2022 read #9: The Evolution of Claire by Tess Sharpe.

The Evolution of Claire by Tess Sharpe

392 pages

Published 2018

Read from March 29 to March 31

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

I came of age as a reader in the aftermath of Jurassic Park. It was the second "grownup" book I ever read. Picture me getting my hands on a fresh paperback copy -- a rarity in my impoverished childhood -- as a dinosaur-obsessed 10 year old in the months before the movie's release. As soon as I finished reading it, I would flip back to the start and begin it all over again. Jurassic Park was my favorite book for an embarrassingly long time.

The countless imitators and cash-ins it spawned, both nonfiction pop-science and hastily thrown-together novels, filled my tween and teen reading. At one point in my teens I made an effort to read every dinosaur novel I could get my hands on. There were classics, like Arthur Conan Doyle's horribly racist The Lost World. There was Crichton's own follow-up The Lost World. There were books I thoroughly enjoyed at the time, such as Greg Bear's Dinosaur Summer, George Gaylord Simpson's iconic The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, and Robert T. Bakker's unwitting furry-bait Raptor Red. There were lesser-known clunkers like James F. David's Footprints of Thunder; books that promised dinosaurs but segued into something else entirely, such as Robert J. Sawyer's End of an Era; and books that are all-but-forgotten now, like Kurt R. A. Giambastiani's The Year the Cloud Fell.

This endeavor continued into my early twenties, when I finally got my hands on the Dinotopia series and Michael Swanwick's Bones of the Earth, and I still picked up the occasional mediocre latecomer, like Lisa M. Graziano and Michael S. A. Graziano's Cretaceous Dawn. But there's a problem with dinosaur novels: the vast majority of them aren't any good. Most writers just don't know how to make dinosaurs interesting in a fictional setting. After the 1990s explosion of dinomania, perhaps dinosaur books were seen as passé, déclassé, a low-brow cash-in. The only high-profile dinosaur novels in recent years were penned by some right-wing hack, and I refuse to read them.

I miss dinosaur books, though. I've spent much of my life writing them, scrapping them, planning to write more. And sometimes I feel the urge to go back to my roots, to dig up and read all the dinosaur novels in the English language, no matter how terrible they might be.

The Evolution of Claire is a corporate YA tie-in novel of the sort that has become de rigueur in the last decade. I can't imagine who, aside from the Universal flunkeys who placed the order for this tie-in, would have clamored for a Jurassic World prequel. Jurassic World itself is so bland, so designed by focus-group, that I wouldn't have been able to tell you the names of any of its characters, even though I just rewatched it last summer. Telling the story of Claire Dearing's summer internship makes as much sense as anything else, I suppose. I certainly never would have picked up a book about whatever character was played by The Worst Chris, and I'm not fully convinced any of the other characters on-screen were given names, or personalities, or anything of the sort.

This book, already a soulless exercise in corporate synergy, is infused with corporate Girl Boss feminism, the sort of suburban white woman's empowerment that celebrates whenever a woman becomes a CEO rather than demanding capitalism's destruction. Claire is our viewpoint, and none of the other characters become anything other than placeholders for plot developments. Said plot covers ground remarkably similar to the first couple seasons of Netflix's Camp Cretaceous, a kids' cartoon that handles the whole "I committed corporate espionage because I was blackmailed into saving my family!" storyline with considerably more verve and characterization.

This book's worst sin: there isn't even that much focus on the dinosaurs. You better believe that if I were contracted to write Jurassic fanfic, I'd devote as much time to actual dinosaurs as to the ins and outs of the internship. No such luck here.

I will say one positive thing: The Evolution of Claire makes me want to write my own stories in the Jurassic universe. Or, perhaps, in a similar setting with all trademarked names filed off. I hate to say it, but there's potential in the idea of Jurassic prequels and follow-ups, just not in the direction that Universal has taken the franchise.