Illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi
325 pages
Published 1998
Read April 27
Rating: 3 out of 5
* Denotes a reread.
Like The Dechronization of Sam Magruder, this is another fixture of my teen years. Unlike Magruder, it was one of my favorite books, once upon a time.
Dinosaur Summer is a revisionist sequel to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, updated with then-current dinosaur science, published right at the tail end of the 1990s dinomania. Its first half is perhaps one of the best stretches of writing to come out of the post-Jurassic Park cash-in period, exploring a post-war world where the public has grown bored of dinosaur circuses and Hollywood bigwigs finance the return of the last circus dinosaurs to the Lost World. At the time, I thought this book was the height of speculative literature, mixing personal turmoil and drama with prehistoric action. The circus dinosaurs become characters in their own right, their smells and care needs and personalities delightfully vivid. I was the same age as its teen protagonist when I first read it; while Peter's father Anthony was worlds better than my own, I could relate to Peter's coming-of-age struggles with Anthony's alcoholism and overbearing personality.
Summer lags in its second half, once our protagonists (small but obvious spoiler here) get stranded on Kahu Hidi, the Grand Tepui. Whereas the circus dinosaurs are lovingly rendered and palpable on the page, Bear seems to lose all interest in "conventional" dinosaurs once we arrive on the Lost World. Bear's prose is more descriptive than fluent, flinging our heroes pell-mell through rock mazes and nighttime forests and into the hive of communal dinosaurs resembling giant mole rats. There's also more than a whiff of well-meaning but misguided 1990s white mysticism: our white hero Peter experiences the spirit-dream that Billie, an Indigenous character, has sought after. Billie aside, basically every main character is a white man.
It's been a while since I've been able to read a book this long in a single day. I think Summer hit a personal sweet spot: it's familiar enough to be a quick read, but enough time has elapsed since I last read it (at least 20 years) that it wasn't familiar enough to be boring.
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