Ouch! Where to begin?? Author David Wood compared this book to Michael Crichton and Matthew Reilly. Cough cough cough. Don’t make me laugh. If you are a big fan of Jurassic Park, do not waste your time with this book.
This novel has two very big problems. One, Chesler just isn’t a good writer. Clearly he didn’t hire an editor, and he sorely needed one. He should have at least had a thesaurus handy to find better words to describe his creatures. Reading the story itself, it just seems like a very dumbed-down version of Crichton. Maybe it’s aimed at young readers….at least that would make partial sense.
Two, if you’re going to write a book about killer prehistoric creatures, you should at least make them genuinely scary. Crichton knew full well that his animals had to carry an aura of menace and predatory intelligence to give them extra oomph to help make the tale plausible. Instead, what we have here are genetically altered animals with ridiculous body features that do very little to excite the reader (a sailback dinosaur with a snake neck and head that can change colors like a chameleon, as an example). And so these monstrosities run, swim and fly around chasing the main characters around, sometimes actually killing and eating them if they get things right.
One star is all, and even that is generous.