TOO MANY DINOSAURS

The plot doesn’t exactly make sense, but that hardly matters when the pictures show a suburban neighborhood suddenly overrun with humongous dinosaurs.

His mother’s steadfast refusal to let him get a dog only breaks down after a lad visits a yard sale to buy first a huge egg that hatches into a rambunctious baby triceratops and then a “dinosaur horn” that brings a towering T. Rex and more dinos thundering out of the trees. In some of his most finished, sharply detailed illustrations ever, Mayer shows casually dressed human figures and massive, exuberant prehistoric ones—all bearing comically exaggerated expressions—chasing one another through yards and down streets until the lad blows his horn again and the surprised-looking dinos fade away. Cut to a final scene in the pet shop, where boy and wriggly puppy bond as Mom takes her abrupt about face with good grace. The first-person narration runs to just a line or so per page, but it might as well not be there at all, so expressive are the illustrations.

Eye candy for dinosaur fans, with piles of yard-sale goods and other junk on hand that will reward closer looks.