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A review by capellan
Dinosaur Lake by Kathryn Meyer Griffith
2.0
More like DinoSNORE Lake.
"Jaws, but with a giant amphibious dinosaur" ought to be right up my alley, but not in the case of this book. It's not the paper-thin characters and implausible plot that are the problem. I could (and have, e.g. in James Hervert's "The Rats") overlook both of those if the book had solid writing and a decent sense of pace and menace. Alas, "Dinosaur Lake" has clumsy dialogue, tedious (and sometimes contradictory) info-dumps about characters, Chekov's guns that never get fired (seriously, if you mention something four times, and it doesn't ultimately matter to your story, you are writing wrong), and worst of all, it commits the one most heinous flaw that cannot be forgiven: it's dull.
"Jaws, but with a giant amphibious dinosaur" ought to be right up my alley, but not in the case of this book. It's not the paper-thin characters and implausible plot that are the problem. I could (and have, e.g. in James Hervert's "The Rats") overlook both of those if the book had solid writing and a decent sense of pace and menace. Alas, "Dinosaur Lake" has clumsy dialogue, tedious (and sometimes contradictory) info-dumps about characters, Chekov's guns that never get fired (seriously, if you mention something four times, and it doesn't ultimately matter to your story, you are writing wrong), and worst of all, it commits the one most heinous flaw that cannot be forgiven: it's dull.