DEAR DINOSAUR
With Real Letters to Read!
From the Dear Dinosaur series
by Chae Strathie ; illustrated by Nicola O'Byrne
A T. Rex and a 6-year-old fan with questions strike up a lively correspondence.
At the suggestion of a curator, young Max writes a fan letter to his favorite dino at the museum and gets a fierce reply: “I do NOT write nice letters to small children. I eat them.” Not daunted, Max continues to send chatty queries—some of which, along with T. Rex’s first letter, are glued-in sheets or cards. T. Rex loosens up in later exchanges, receives Max’s gifts of a lost tooth and a “Sausagesaurus” (a rubber duck, as it turns out) with thanks, and, in a final email message, promises not to eat him when he visits again. Sticking to more traditional media, Max at the end crafts a home-made greeting card to proclaim that the two will be “Dinopals forever!” Though T. Rex’s stationery comes from a fictitious museum in South Carolina, the post boxes in the illustrations and the overall tone of the language reflect this import’s British origins. Like Max and his interracial parents (dark-skinned dad, light-skinned mum), the dinosaurs exhibited in the museum are mostly smiling figures in O’Byrne’s brightly colored cartoons.
A lighthearted if unremarkable (and perhaps a bit outdated?) addition to the epistolary genre.
(Novelty. 6-8)