Supersaurs 1: Raptors of Paradise by Jay Jay Burridge

Supersaurs 1: Raptors of Paradise by Jay Jay Burridge
Buy Supersaurs 1: Raptors of Paradise by Jay Jay Burridge at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: John Lloyd
Summary: This is a book that immediately proves it can open an intelligent series in a very fine way, and without the bells and whistles of apps and websites etc – although it has them too.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 352	Date: September 2017
Publisher: Supersaurs
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 9781786968005
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I'm thirteen years OLD, not young. And it's a good job too, for her grandma and godfather have taken Bea on an extended holiday to Indonesia, where the wild dinosaurs live. Yes, this is a world where they never went extinct, and have been used for riding for leisure or as pack animals ever since mankind domesticated them. But wild and dangerous ones still exist, such as the Raptors of Paradise. Bea's older guardians have another reason to go there, though – they are in search of clues that might lead them to at last discover the fate of Bea's birth parents, who disappeared a decade ago. She's unaware of this being the final grasp at one last clue – and all of them are ignorant of how the real danger and mystique on the island may actually come not from the fabulous beasts, but from other humans…

This is a really, really good book, with a lovely approach to world building. And it had it in spades before we got to the final appendix that pretends to be a nature guide to the dinosaurs that are featured, whether most briefly or in great detail. This is a world where we never needed to rediscover the dinosaur record from bones starting in the Victorian era, of course, and so they're named in slightly different ways that have perhaps themselves evolved. So we don't get a Tyrannosaurus Rex as such, but we do have a Tyrant. Ankylosaurs are Kylosaurs, Triceratops Tritops and so on. (Oh, and we're told there are also Womp Rhats as well, which makes me wonder how they're going to get away with that nod to Star Wars.)

Second to that naming, the animals have really maturely-wrought natures. Yes, they pretty much do what we expect of dinosaurs, but the titular Raptors of Paradise are great – living alongside the birds of paradise we know of from our real world, they have the same manic dancing, housekeeping and wooing habits as the birds. These are all feathered dinosaurs, although whether the author is insisting they all were feathery in the first place, or have just evolved that way in the last 65 million years is not known.

What is known is that this has a great plot to go with the setting. Characters are strong, even if the elderly Bunty isn't that elderly in the end, and Theodore (the best friend to the missing parents) is a bit of an Indiana Jones knock-off, which the 1930s setting only enhances. The whole scenario really is one to relish, and while I was able to follow the clues as to what was really happening, and what we were really being told, the book still held its mysteries very well, delivered its surprises in great fashion, and still offered a more than satisfactory drama for these pages – not to forget it was also having to set up what will eventually be a six-book series.

So why the slightly shaved mark – that final edge taken off the five spangly stars? Well, the first time someone needs the loo (which I'll admit is something you just don't expect from a book like this, as so many of them seem to implausibly pass it by) is hilarious; by the tenth time, it's worn a bit thin. There are some later examples of hiding places that just made me scoff. And a further in-joke cinematic reference at the very end annoyed, for it pulled me from the drama here, which was in a very fine world of its own without needing to quote other people's hits thank you.

I'm writing this not in a position to check out the app, which apparently will bring the artworks to life, and the website bears to mind the author's previous five or six years working with what he terms Supersaurs as opposed to telling me about the books. I'm just going to ignore all that, in favour of what I learnt and enjoyed in this volume. I learnt that I am going to be eager to read the other books, on this evidence, and I enjoyed it a heck of a lot.

I must thank the publishers for my review copy.

It reminded me of the clever and believable way a young woman becomes a dragon-hunter in A Natural History of Dragons: A Memoir by Lady Trent by Marie Brennan and its sequels, although the target audience will probably prefer the likes of Every Hiddden Thing by Kenneth Oppel.

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You can read more book reviews or buy Supersaurs 1: Raptors of Paradise by Jay Jay Burridge at Amazon.com.

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