Looking For a Good Book

Who doesn’t like dinosaurs, right? Even my 2 year old grandson knows what a dinosaur is. They’re on toys, they’re on his pajamas, they’re on TV shows!

The first half of author Riley Black’s book is a narrative, with an anthropomorphic T-Rex, looking for a safe place to lay her eggs, find food, and then to protect her young and teach them how to hunt and scavenge for food.

Honestly, I didn’t enjoy this.  I am not a fan of non-fiction that is written like fiction – giving people words and intentions that we really don’t know they had. Doing this for animals take this, which I already don’t like, and magnifies it. We don’t really know the thought pattern of modern animals (birds and alligators – two dinosaur-related species – are still a bit of a mystery), how can we hope to know what a creature who live a millennia ago thought? I nearly gave up on the book, but decided to power though and see where it was going to go.

Then I got to the second section in which author Black explains the reality behind the first part of the book, chapter by chapter. Ahhhh.

Here we get the play-by-play, answers to questions I had and questions I hadn’t thought of … why this location for the eggs? What are they eating? Do they really eat bone? Why, why, why. Riley Black’s answers to these questions is what I was looking for in the first place when I opened this book, and while I’m still not convinced that this was the best way to present it, I understand that there are probably a lot of readers who prefer the fictional narrative to present non fiction.

I learned a fair amount, which I appreciated and it is one of the main reasons I like non-fiction. I’m hardly an expert on dinosaurs now, but getting some insight into some of the new methods of identification and how much the bones and eggs that have survived have revealed, was truly enlightening.

I wish I had known that we’d be getting the background on the narrative section.  I’m confident I would have enjoyed it more. I also probably would have gone chapter by chapter – narrative, then the background, narrative, then the background, and so forth. If you read reviews before reading a book, take note: whether you like narrative non-fiction or more history/science based non-fiction, both are here.

Looking for a good book? Riley Black’s Tyrant Lizard Queen starts this non-fiction book with a narrative account of a female T-Rex raising her off-spring, complete with dinosaur thoughts and concerns. The narrative is followed by a chapter-by-chapter explanation of how this narrative makes sense today.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

3-1/2 stars

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Tyrant Lizard Queen: The Love, Life, and Terror of Earth’s Greatest Carnivore

author: Riley Black

publisher: St. Martin’s Press

ISBN: 9781250403483

hardcover, 288 pages