Interesting illustrations and extra material, but really poor story. ( )

I really wanted to like this book more. I was enchanted by James Gurney's previous Dinotopia books but this book fails to live up to that standard. The art is excellent as usual, both colorful and detailed. The story is where this book falls flat, the plot is cliched and predictable. It loses the wonder of an exploration journal in its move to a more standard storytelling style and in so doing, I feel it just becomes a nicely illustrated boring story.

The plot expands on the Poseidian society of the ancient past that was introduced in The World Beneath and so if you would like to read more about how that society functioned this is a by the numbers story but is competently told, just don't expect anything groundbreaking. ( )

I hate almost everything about this. It's a third as long as the previous books at 50 something pages. It takes place in the far past and focuses on the ancient, technologically advanced "Atlantis" culture, rather than the characters we're already familiar with. I already disliked the Atlantis angle from the previous book, so that's just fantastic. Even the physical quality of the book itself is much poorer than the previous ones, thanks to the inclusion of a stupid fold-out board game in the front that takes up half the book's total thickness, and makes it so that the pages aren't actually attached to the spine, but rather suspended between two sheets of paper glued to each cover. In my used copy (which is otherwise in good condition), these pages are starting to peel away from the covers, leaving me with a loose wobbly mess of a book.





As always, Gurney's art is great (although generally not as inspired here as in the previous books), and it's interesting to see his visual take on an advanced society with robots, flying vehicles, advanced computers, and remote piloted drones. I feel bad giving it one star just because of that, but it's such a major disappointment that I feel I have to. What the hell happened here? How did this series go from a challenging children's book about solid world-building to one that's so pandering it needed to become a third of the length, include a crappy board game, completely remove all the older characters in favor of just a single young boy that's more 'identifiable,' and have lots of flashy Star Wars-esque imagery? Did the previous books really sell that badly? This is one of the most egregious cases of "dumbing down" that I have ever seen. ( )

This book contained beautiful pictures and wonderful, engaging writing. I love the world of Dinotopia, so I very much enjoyed this book. ( )

Not as good as the other books, but it's a very interesting prequel. ( )