Page 45 Review by Stephen
What an unexpectedly moving little book. I am, I concede, quite easy to reduce if not to tears then at least to swallowing hard in a bid to stave off such embarrassing soppiness. However, pets are going to hit me where it hurts, particularly if the pet gets hurt, and sure enough within the first few pages young Ely's dog lies six feet under. To try to mitigate his son's distress, Dad sends Ely to go and stay on his grandfather's farm ("I thought you said I was too young to go work for Grandpa!" "When a boy loses his dog he gets a lot older," replies the Dad with perception) where Ely stumbles first upon a bully and then upon a living, breathing and improbably cute T-Rex, drawn in beautiful Bill Watterson fashion. Unexpectedly the beast is both loyal, playful and stupid, but petrified of fire and there's a great sequence later on involving real or genetic memory, depending on where you think the T-Rex came from, in which fire sends Tommy (oh yeah, Ely named him after his late dog) into another blind frenzy and you see what it sees: flaming meteors and lava.
It's a coming of age story at heart, in which Ely learns the painful extent to which a pet may prove both tenacious and loyal (those last dozen pages really put me through the wringer - I'm such a big girl's blouse!), plus the nature, power and value of forgiveness.
The bully's well evoked: he really pisses you off, then you begin to understand why he does what he does... and then he pisses you off even further.
There's a cameo by Ray Harryhausen (he of stop-motion fame) and those final forest-fire scenes are nothing short of blistering, particularly the light on the big lizard's form.
Jeff Smith, creator of BONE gives this a big thumbs-up, as does Guillermo del Toro.
