Dinopics
You can picture James Gurney’s publishers, worried that they might not be squeezing all the lucre they could out of his wildly popular Dinotopia franchise, begging Gurney for something even juicier for the third book in the series. “We’ve hit the young adult demo and the older kids, but the real gold is in them anklebiters.” Gurney was a boyhood pal of velvet-Elvis merchant Thomas Kinkade (says the jacket bio for the first Dinotopia book), which isn’t necessarily a strike against a guy, but it makes it easier to understand why Gurney went for it. So the third book in the series, First Flight, is a naked grab for market share: idea-wise, a bunch of outtakes from the first two books, and in story and narrative style reminiscent of George Lucas at his boneheadedest.
But that’s OK. The pictures are still fabulous, with the ghost pencil lines and brush strokes to give the feeling of being sketched on the fly from real life, the bright clear Hudson Valley School light, and Gurney can actually pull off that silly kind of steam-punk technology that Bruce Sterling couldn’t. Laura can sit and examine the pictures for a long time, without anyone to read her the text. And it comes with a built-in board game that works reasonably well for a five-year-old.
I wonder, by the way, if all these books are going to have to be done over now that someone has rearranged the dinosaurs’ faces. It turns out that the nostrils are farther down in front than anyone thought, which changes the look of at least some of the dinosaurs pretty significantly. We await the recall notices.
Categorised as: Read this to me