Karen's Dinosaur

Synopsis: Karen Brewer and her friends have been recently studying a lot about dinosaurs and how they lived. One day, Mrs. Hoffman, Karen's substitute teacher, makes an announcement to the second grade class, that they would be going to New York City, to the American Museum of Natural History as a field trip, to learn more about nature, minerals, rocks, history, people and more. Karen is also thrilled to hear that they would be taking the trip with their pen pals from Ms. Mandel's class in New York. However, when she tells the news to David Michael, he becomes angry because his class is also learning about dinosaurs and his teacher did not tell them that they would be going to New York. After doing a Hall of Fame and a "Wanted" poster of dinosaurs as a class activity, Karen and her pen pal Maxie Medvin decide on studying Ornitholestes as their dinosaur for the field trip. When Karen mentions this to David Michael, he tells that she is greedy because she gets to go to New York AND use the dinosaur that he selected to write a report on. When Karen goes to New York with her class, she realizes that she should get a souvenir for her family and friends, but gets lost in the museum! Can she find her way back and stop fighting with David Michael as well? Review: I thought this was a fun book to read, but still not as good as some of the other books in the series. It has a lot of details about dinosaurs and New York that made it interesting, but there was not much going on with the characters to make me consider this as one of the better ones in the series. Except for Karen and David Michael's argument, and towards the end of the book where Karen gets lost in the museum, the rest of the book was like reading an information book on dinosaurs, which I don't think there is anything wrong with, but I just didn't find it that interesting. However, I enjoyed Karen's argument with David Michael, and was wondering how Karen would find the others in the museum, even though she purposely got herself into trouble in the first place. The illustrations provided by Susan Tang were nice, but again, I felt it didn't add well to the story. Since this book focused so much on dinosaurs, I thought there would be some illustrations about the various species of dinosaurs to go with the information, but there weren't any. I was a little disappointed in this matter, because I was hoping to see what an Ornitholestes looked like. Overall, I thought there wasn't anything wrong with the book, and it had its moments at times, but it just wasn't interesting enough for me.