Bone Warsby Brett Davis, , Search Cheap Books, Discount Books, ISBN 0671878808

Customer Reviews:

More dinosaurs please

I liked this book. It was well written and an enjoyable read. I think I expected to read about a few more dinosaurs than just a monoclonius and a lizard man. Compared to Thomas Hopp's new Dinosaur Wars, this one comes off as a little lacking in the thing I read dino-fiction for: Dinosaurs! Still, it is long on charm, with space ships and wild indians. It might be a little dated by its view of dinosaurs as cold-blooded lizards, because scientists have recently learned that the beasts were warm blooded and covered with feathers, as in Hopp's two new dino-novels. Well, I suppose even dinosaur fiction is evolving.

Aliens stole our fossils! A fine and funny tall tale.

There's not a great deal of geological science-fiction extant, so I'm pleased to report that Bone Wars is worthy of your attention.

Montana Territory, 1876: Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope are both digging in the Judith River fossil beds, with no great success, and spying on each other's camps. They learn of another bone-digger, who shields his camp behind a "ghost wall," and has found some truly magnificent dinosaur specimens. A *fourth* paleontologist appears, an odd-looking fellow who claims to be from Iceland, and wants help to save the prize bones from being shipped off to "Sweden"....

Stir in a cowboy who's really a girl, a Sioux who's a Yale graduate, a deserter from the Little Big Horn, and a wild ride on a ceratopsian -- all done in impeccable late-19th century prose -- and you have a most entertaining confection. Recommended, with the usual caveat that others' reaction to (alleged) humor is notoriously unpredictable.

Brett Davis, whose writing I haven't previously encountered, has clearly done his historical homework. He writes in a spritely mock-Victorian style that's just right for the tale. This is a very amusing book. Fluff, but *good* fluff. I picked this one up on a whim, having heard of neither author nor title. I'm glad I did.

not too good!

This novel is not half as good as its sequel. It seems Davies was practicing still when he wrote it and that he developed his satirical talent only when he wrote the second novel. It is a good read though, interesting enough. But you are a little disappointed when you read the second book first.

If you dig alternate history and dinosaurs

This is a light and entertaining novel set in the Wild West in the post-Custer's last stand period, when Men were Men and so were paleantologists. The competitive parring of the foremost experts in the field, O. C. Marsh of Yale and Edward Cope of Philadelphia, is the milieu further complicated by the presence of a young woman masquerading as a man, Sitting Bull and nearly the entire Sioux nation, and two extraterrestrial bone-hunters with advanced technology and and secret agendas of their own. I enjoyed it -- I have been fascinated by the great "Bone Wars" (see the Kathryn Lasky novel of the same title for an entertaining take) for a long time (not geological time, but nevertheless...) so I was a sucker for this novel.

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