Day Of The Dinosaur

[Bigfootman]

Here's my review on a little known Hardy's Boys book, Day Of The Dinosaur:

Writing: For a digest it's quite good, I like how they used the scientific throry of when dinosaurs lived, not the creation throry. However, the clifhangers fell flat quite a few times.
7

Myistery: Robotic Dinos going crazy= Hardy Boys fun! Just wish they spend a little more time on the dinosaurs.
7

Supsects: Fighting scientests, sugglers, the book has some of the best supects in a Hardy Boys Book.
10

Action: This where the book falls flat.  Altough there's some action with the dinos, it's more talking. And the bad gy gives up without a fight!
5

Reread Value: There is some reread value if your a dinosaur fan but othwise this is a one time book.
5

Pros:
-About dinosaurs!
-Good supsects!
-Great for a dinosaur fan!

Cons:
-No fight at the end.
-Needs more dinosaur parts!
-Little reread value

Perplexing:
-Why dosen't the cover match the splash page?

Rating:
6.8
Good

[Olivia]

It intrigues me that you say that the suspects were that good for a HBs book. Too bad it's not a better book overall. I probably would never get around to it anyways.

[tomswift2002]

I remember that I read Reel Thrills and Day Of The Dinosaur one right after the other about 10 years and I found Reel Thrills to have been the best of the two and I've read Thrills many times since.  With Thrills I found that I was drawn into how a movie production company works, and how the criminal was copying the stunts of an old black and white B movie that the studio had produced decades before. 

Day Of The Dinosaur I found the Hardy's were stuck in the one place...the Bayport Museum and that the action didn't move from the grounds of the museum.  I was sort of looking forward to a scene where the criminal maybe stole one of the "dinosaurs" and had it go crashing through Bayport, which didn't happen.  Plus, I didn't like that it was just 1 criminal.  It seems that since 1987, most of the Digests contained just 1 criminal and no gangs.  Personally I liked reading about the gangs in the original books.

[Bigfootman]

I felt it was a decent book, I think this would be better if someone added more action and made it a casefile, becuse being a digest pinned the book down from reaching it's full potinal.

[tomswift2002]

Don't forget that the Digests were the continuation of the Original series, although I found that when Simon & Schuster took over they really clamped down on what could and could not be in the series after their failed attempt to take the Digests in the direction that they took the Casefiles.  They wanted to make sure that the books were really acceptable for kids in Grades 4-8 and they didn't allow the books to really go into the Grade 7-8 area of that scale.  If you look at the majority of the Digests post-1987 and up till 2001 with Kickoff To Danger you'll notice that only about 1/15 of the books have a RL above 6.9 (Reading level of 6.9 would be equal to the level of education that a person would have in Grade 6 at the time of graduation in June).