I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

To be honest, this was a mess. The author had a very cool premise – dinosaur rodeos! – and clearly had no idea what to do with it. This novella can’t decide what kind of story it is, and the result is that it tries to do half a dozen things and fails at all of them. Is it coming-of-age? Is it whimsical fun? Is it a romance? Is it a dystopia? Is it a boy-and-his-beast story? Is it found-family? No, to all of the above. I was constantly asking myself what the point of this book was; it ended up so wishy-washy that it was mind-numbing. It took me weeks to read what I should have been able to finish in a day, because it kept putting me to sleep.

In the future, the USA has completely broken down into a bunch of little religious fiefdoms and militia-run territories and everything is terrible. Except humans kind of discovered time-travel, and naturally decided dinosaur circuses-and-rodeos should be a thing. I am not exactly opposed to this – who could be?! – but McDonald waffled on every aspect, unable to commit. One moment we’re being subjected to loving descriptions of the pageantry of the dino circuses, the costumes of the dino rodeo-riders, the wonder seeing a dino in the flesh inspires – the next it’s musings on whether this is all terribly demeaning and unnatural for the dinosaurs, flirting with the idea that maybe this is Wrong without confronting the idea head-on. As promising as the the various secondary characters are, the pagecount is too low to really get to know any of them properly, or for the protagonist to bond with them, so the found-family vibes the author’s clearly going for just fizzle out pathetically. Etc.

At 70%, the main character goes off to rescue a best friend we’d never heard a whisper of prior to that. His mentor up and leaves the circus they’re both a part of with no warning, effectively ‘just because’. What is the deal with Prince? Is anyone ever going to explain what the Silver Clowns are? Nope and nope.

Wonderful cover I would love to have on my wall; a book it’s not worth wasting your time on.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I love the premise of this, the worldbuilding is WONDERFUL, and I really like most of the main cast (and suspect the ones I don’t adore yet would grow on me if I kept reading).

My issue is the prose, especially the dialogue. Quite often, there are sentences that sound jarring or clunky; the writing rhythm stops and starts a lot. The lack of contractions in the dialogue makes all the conversations sound very forced, unnatural, even among characters who are supposed to be close or friendly.

But that would be more trouble than that was worth.

The above is a pretty excellent example of what I mean by clunky phrasing – it’s not wrong, not grammatically incorrect or anything like that, but it makes me twitch because using ‘that’ instead of ‘it’ makes the sentence ping as odd.

Before this, Hlaz-mlan only felt fear and anger, but now, she was also positively vindictive.

I just think this is a really awkward way of saying what you mean. ‘Positively vindictive’ isn’t great, but the ‘also’ makes it worse, as does the comma after ‘now’.

These walls were grown, bent into shape in the time of her great-grandparents, carefully preserved and periodically reglazed. This was the first time someone would lash at the walls violently, cause destruction.

I included the first sentence for context, but the second one…eesh. Again, really clunky phrasing. ‘lash at the walls violently’?

Mlhlh-af sounded like he was molting. It was definitely not the season for that nor his turn so soon after another molting.

‘so soon after his previous molt’ would have been infinitely better.

“I could have jumped us out–” Mawu restarted.

‘Restarted’? In context, the character Mawu is saying something they’ve already said/been trying to argue, but why would you phrase it like that?

If you don’t have any problems with these quotes, then I hope you pick up this book, because it’s really great, and if the prose weren’t making me twitch I’d probably love it dearly! Alas, it IS making me twitch, so I’m going to stop at 23%.

INSTANT NEW FAVE

EXPECT THIS ON MY BEST OF YEAR LIST COME DECEMBER

AHHHHHHHHH