Life After the Dinosaurs - Softcover

Grade 4-6-- Although these books do contain some new and current information about dinosaurs, they are difficult to use as reference sources because of a lack of indexing. Each book alternates between factual material relating to its title subject and short, fictionalized "slice-of-life" accounts of various prehistoric beasts. The books aren't well organized, and it's not always apparent from the book's title what subjects it covers. The illustrations add to the confusion; sometimes animals are shown with accompanying line drawings of people--apparently to show scale. Other times, animals are grouped together with no mention of size relationship to one another. Still other pictures have captions noting, "not drawn to scale." Some uniformity here would help. Overall, the illustrations have a cheap look to them, and are neither informative nor dramatic (an angry T. Rex looks about as mean as a duckbill). The general low-budget appearance of this series, along with its haphazard organization, will act as a deterrent to even the most earnest of readers. John Stidworthy's "Creatures from the Past" series (Silver Burdett) covers similar material, has indexes, and is far better organized. --Cathryn A. Camper, Minneapolis Public Library
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