Book review: Raptor Red

I like using Goodreads to review books I read. I thought I'd start posting them here as well. This time I read Raptor Red, by paleontologist Robert T. Bakker. It's a fictional story about a year in the life of a female Utahraptor trying to survive after the death of her mate.

　
4/5 stars

So first of all, I am a huge dinosaur nerd. Like, "watched Jurassic Park multiple times a day when I was 5" kind of nerd. So it's a huge struggle for me not to rate this a 5 just because it contains biologically accurate (I mean, as accurate as you can get when you're giving human thoughts to animals and you don't know that raptors had feathers because you live in the early nineties) dinosaurs that do not exist just to be big scurrrry monsters.

That being said, Bakker is the king of infodumping. If I was only mildly interested in dinosaurs, I would be annoyed at stopping the action to talk about how one crocodile is such a good breeder and how all modern crocs might be related to her. I found it fascinating at times, but maybe that's just me.


Anyway. Thoughts:

* I like that raptors also struggled with body image.

* All the characters are so different and realistic animals without seeming like they're just human characters in dino suits. The dumb little gaston is the cutest.

* I don't know how scientifically sound the flower scent theory is, but it was so funny how confused and scared the male raptor was.

* The conflict(s) over the chicks were an interesting source of drama you can't get in human stories ("I like this guy, but I won't sleep with him until I'm 100% sure he won't kill my family..." "I really like this girl, but I also really want to kill her nieces because they don't share my genes, and I'm just not sure how she'll react to that...").

* At some point near the end, my brain started picturing the raptors as Chocobos. That was weird, but not entirely unpleasant.

* The ostrich dino that could have started the first dinosaur religion because she thought a mouse-type-thing turned into a frog may be my favorite part of the entire book. I adore her.

　
Also, this is not related to the actual book but the copy I borrowed from the library had a bunch of random words underlined on pages 42 and 43. Pretty sure it's a secret code.
You can read more of my reviews on my Goodreads page.