After reading (and loving) A Children’s Bible, I was not expecting Dinosaurs to be so gentle, so earnest, so attuned to its characters’ flaws and traumas while being even more attuned to the ways their pain has strengthened them with empathy and circumspection. This is a brief and generous novel that begins with our hero’s 2,500-mile journey on foot from NYC to Phoenix and ends with him getting cactus barbs torn out of his back with pliers, with so much good stuff sandwiched in the middle there.
Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet (List Price: $26.95, W. W. Norton & Company, 9781324021469, October 2022)
Reviewed by Kat Leache, Novel. in Memphis, Tennessee