2 out of 5

Bunn has a prose kids book out that I keep meaning to buy.  I’ve felt like the writer has shown a good acceptance of the absurd in his work that could easily translate to a fun YA viewpoint.  But after reading ‘Terrible Lizard’ – which, though its not Boom!ed up with banners announcing its all-ages appeal it most certainly is aimed for a younger audience – I worry that that approach will comes bundled with incredibly dumbed down dialogue.

This is ‘a boy and his dog’ story, but its ‘a girl and her dinosaur that daddy accidentally brings through a temporal rift.’  I won’t criticize the lack of originality in the setup – see Runaways, or Tommysaurus Rex and I’m sure others for a similar premise – because many kids books use a template as a springboard, and that’s fine.  But I will criticize the lack of making this variation on a theme seem interesting.  Like I guess our lead is relateable because she’s cool and rides a skateboard and is bored by dad’s dumb experiments, but it’s way too much character shorthand for us to be concerned for her safety when the dino pops up on, like, page five, or for it to feel like anything other than “that’s the way the plot goes” when the dino ‘imprints’ on her ’cause she’s the first human the dinosaur sees.  The first person narrative also forces Bunn to get cheeky, which is not something he’s great at.  Brevity serves the writer well, otherwise he tries to get cute and trips over his words and phrases, aiming for speech that sounds forced because it’s trying to sound too natural.

And it must be said that artist Drew Moss has a good, light comic style for the upbeat nature of the tale, but it’s a bit too simplistic for the panels which require a sense of scope or big emotion, which, in a people juxtaposed with dinosaurs comic, happens enough.  So the key introductory moments with our ‘terrible lizard’ fall pretty flat.

I get the idea here, to do a fast-paced high-adventure book for kids, but it’s not zany enough to pull that off, and stuffed with too many clumsy attempts at ingratiating us to its lead while also wanting to ditch all that character crap and get right to the action.  I’m allowing a second star because I’m almost certainly judging this too harshly, but when things feel off after the first page, the book is probably pretty questionable.