What readers think of Dinosaurs, plus links to write your own review.

I have been looking forward to this book since I read Lydia Millet's last novel, A Children's Bible, which was much praised as a climate collapse novel. It was, indeed, a book about climate catastrophe, and I was very interested in her depiction of exactly the ways our social structures could crumble, if and when the climate does. But I was even more fascinated with her child's-eye-view of adults in authority, their failings and foibles and foolishness and self-delusion. Her young characters, as the story progressed, moved more and more in their own alternate society, and were sharply drawn in all their neediness and wishfulness, harsh judgment, absolutism, and sympathy. The adults were mostly feckless and in some cases morally disastrous.

So it came as a complete surprise to find that Dinosaurs is, in its way, a novel about adults trying very hard to be good. The central character is a man who, for various reasons, can choose to do whatever he wants, without family pressures or financial ones. He chooses to do good, and for much of the book he doesn't get much credit for it, even or especially from himself. Other adult supporting characters play out their own efforts at doing the right thing, too. Once again, the children who appear in the book are very much their own people, and comprise some of its most interesting characters. These two aspects of the book, the well-drawn young people and the truly well-meaning grown-ups, combined to create many moments of delight, in which the reader can vicariously experience the beauty and relief of a child, or an adult in need, actually being met, quietly, with concern and help.

If I have a criticism, it is that I was left feeling that the world I was experiencing as I read was not fully imagined but, rather, sketched in like a photographer's backdrop. And the main character, too, never felt to me truly three dimensional and alive, but remained a bit vague to me, even as he developed and came into focus to himself over the course of the novel.