THE DRAGON STONE

Someday, Miggy wants to tell a story that will make everyone say, “Wow!”

Miggy stays behind every summer while her friends migrate with their families to hunt mammoths. When they return, she looks forward to hearing about their adventures. Just once, Miggy wants to have an experience of her own to relate. With this, Regan develops Miggy's cave-character and her home in the Triassic Forest. Readers share Miggy's excitement when she finds a dragon stone and learns it is as magical as the Clan's wise grannies have said it is when she wishes on it to escape Velociraptors and to help her brother. In this early chapter book with unexpected depth, Miggy experiences an ethical dilemma when she wonders if it is right to keep the power to herself. Her question is answered when she and the grannies are trapped by thrashing Spinosauruses, and she must give it up for them all to be saved. Miggy may no longer hold the stone, but she has been granted her greatest wish: Finally, Miggy has an adventure to tell her friends.

Sticklers for accuracy about the Triassic Period may have trouble with the premise, but most newly independent readers will look forward to more encounters with dinosaurs, humans and the first mammals as the series continues.