Synopsis:
Come one, come all to the dinosaur circus!
Tif Tamim wants nothing more than to be a dinosaur buckaroo. An orphan in search of a place to rest his head and a job to weigh down his pockets, Tif has bounced from circus to circus, yearning for a chance to ride a prehistoric beauty under the sparkling lights of a big-top.
To become a buckaroo, Tif needs to learn the tools of the trade, yet few dino maestros want to take a scrawny nobody from nowhere under their wing. But when Tif frees a dino from an abusive owner and braves the roving gangs of the formerly-American west to bring the dino to safety, he catches someone’s eye. And boy, how those eyes dazzle Tif from the back of a bucking carnotaur.
Review:
Of course, we shouldn’t judge books by their cover. We all know this, but sometimes it’s hard to actually practice. While I overall enjoyed Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur, the book cover screams of a book that I don’t think we really got here. There’s a ton of potential that seems to be left on the cutting room floor with this book, even with some interesting themes and ideas that seem to float through its pages.
When I first started the book, I struggled to emotionally connect to it, and I think there is a certain vocabulary that author Ian McDonald has written into his futuristic sci-fi tale of dinosaurs traveling through time to join humans in a dystopian world. THat vocabulary isn’t always apparent of what it means or what it refers to. The longer you read, the more it clicks, but it took a little while before I fully engaged with the story.
I’ve debated saying this, but the vibe I had from parts of this book matched another book that is very unforgettable — Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, the 1992 cyberpunk novel. The beginnings of Stephenson’s novel were also a challenge for me, struggling to understand what was really happening in this strange vision of the future set forth by the author. Now…take that analogy with a grain of salt. The vibes were similar, but Snow Crash is a classic from a very specific time and place in history. Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur is an interesting exploration of one young man’s experience during this mish-mash of humanity and dinosaurs and feels disjointed and messy at times, but I think the nature of the novella follows with the growing maturity of our main character, Tif Tamim.
Tif is fascinated by the dinosaurs that find their way to our world through a rip in the time-space continuum and that fascination puts him on a path that coincides with a type of loss of innocence with experiences that open his eyes to the amazing parts of his world, along with mistakes and misadventure that show him the cruelty of the world that exists after the fall of humanity.
If you can get it for a decent price or find it at your local library, I’d recommend reading Boy, with Accidental Dinosaur. But for the size and, at times, fragmented nature of the book, it will definitely be a book that is hit or miss for some people.
Thank you to Tor Books for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
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