With inks by Winter Jay Kiakas
240 pages
Published 2023
Read October 5
Rating: 4 out of 5
In one of the last recorded instances of Twitter being useful to anyone, I happened upon Tas Mukanik tweeting about this book just the other day, and promptly lined up my pre-order.
For a few years now I've felt we're overdue for another dinosaur fiction renaissance. Maybe not to the same degree we saw in the 1990s, and maybe not in adult fiction, but absolutely in YA and middle-grade. Every so often I check out the YA section of the chain bookseller and I'm surprised that there aren't any love triangle trilogies set in a technomagical royal court banished to the Late Cretaceous. (Or at least more books than one spun off from Jurassic World.) Do I have to do everything around here myself??
So Lost Time was quite the welcome find. It’s the heartwarming tale of Evie, an accidental time castaway, who raises Ada, an azhdarchid pterosaur, from an egg. It hits some of my favorite “lost in the Cretaceous” story beats: surviving by trial and error, making tools and traps, dealing with the climate, learning how to ride a tame beastie, an interlude amongst some giant trees. It’s also sweet and wholesome and quite lovely. If you ever wanted an array of Cretaceous fauna depicted in a post-Steven Universe CalArts-esque style, this is the book for you. It’s right up there with the first Dinosaur Sanctuary as one of my new favorite pieces of dino fiction.
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