Sammy and the Dinosaurs by Ian Whybrow

Sammy and the Dinosaurs by Ian Whybrow, illustrated by Adrian Reynolds

Rating: 4 stars

Sometimes, a book just grows on you. Unlike adult books, where you carve out the time to read a book once and maybe just maybe you read it another time a decade or two later, you read children's books again and again and again in the course of a week. Sometimes in the course of a day. Once, while a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand, I walked out from seeing a movie, paid for a second ticket for the same movie, and walked right back in to watch it again. It was that good. Or maybe it was just because the air conditioning felt so good? Or that the men on the screen looked like me, but weighed more than me? Hmmm...this is a tangent I should end. Anyway, my point is that good children's books are read hundreds times more than adult books, and sometimes the good-ness of a book doesn't reveal itself until its third or fourth (or tenth or twentieth) reading.

Take Sammy and the Dinosaurs. At first, I wasn't so impressed. I found the title on a list so ordered it up from the library. It's about a little boy who finds a bunch of old dinosaurs in his grandma's attic. He washes them, patches them up, and then carries them around in a big bucket. They do everything with him, until he forgets them on a train. He's sad, but Grandma takes him to the lost and found where he names them all individually, which impresses the Lost and Found man: "They are definitely your dinosaurs. Definitely."

I really like how the dinosaurs are Sammy's dinosaurs, and he takes his role as caretaker very seriously. Other than the noted exception of forgetting them on the train, they are inseparable. And he obviously misses them wholeheartedly when they are gone. The dinosaurs obviously are alive to him, which is evident in the cute illustrations and also in how, just twice, the dinosaurs whisper things to him.

It was always cute, but it wasn't until the third or fourth reading that I was hooked. Reading this book aloud helped me love it. It was really fun to whisper like the dinosaurs do in Ben's ear--which, of course, made Lorelei lean into me, waiting for her turn for Mommy to come close and whisper in her ear. It made Lorelei and Ben pay attention all the more. And then, at the end when Sammy reclaims his pets-oops-I-mean-toys, he closes his eyes and yells, "Come back my Stegosaurus! Come back my Brontosaurus!" to all of them. Ben especially gets a kick how I, too, closed my eyes and yell the same way.

Hmmm. Maybe, in Lorelei and Ben's eyes, this book is just okay but they give ME five stars for reading it...well, I'd like to hope that's true. I might go buy this book so I can read it to them in their teenage years. Maybe it'll still hold their attention then?

Around the time we started reading this book (thanks to our local library), we went shopping for new Spring pajamas. Lorelei chose mermaid ones and Ben chose, you guessed it, dinosaurs. My husband overheard me reading this book to our kids and decided that they needed more dinosaur stuff. Now. Lots of it. So on its way to us are three more books (why didn't we preview them at the library?!) and a huge trunk--little buckets are just for little imaginary Sammys--full of dinosaurs. So maybe the dinosaur obsession will happen a little earlier for our kids.