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Mary Pope Osborne's Dinosaurs Before Dark is a time-travel adventure for 7 year olds about a brother and sister who find a tree house full of books at the top of an oak.
Jack is eight and a half and likes real things. His sister Annie is seven and loves pretend. So when she shouts about a monster in the woods, he doesn't believe a word of it.
What she's actually found is a very long rope ladder. It climbs all the way to a tree house, and the tree house is crammed with books.
Jack opens one about dinosaurs, touches a picture of a Pteranodon and wishes he could see one for real. The wind gets up. The tree house spins. When everything goes still, there's a real live Pteranodon gliding outside the window.
This is the very first Magic Tree House book, so it's where Jack and Annie's trips begin. (In the UK it has also been published as Valley of the Dinosaurs, in case you spot it under that name.)
Their trip back sixty-five million years has a Triceratops munching magnolia flowers, a whole valley of nests full of baby dinosaurs, and a duck-billed mum who is very unhappy about Annie getting so close. Then a Tyrannosaurus rex turns up.
The fun is all in the two of them. Jack wants to look everything up and take notes like a proper scientist. Annie just wants to make friends with everything (she names the Pteranodon Henry, after the dog next door). Got a careful one and a fearless one at home? You'll probably recognise this pair!
The sentences are very short, which makes it a lovely one for a child who has just started reading longer books on their own. Jack keeps checking the dinosaur book too, so your reader picks up a few facts without noticing.
The T. rex part is properly tense. Jack hides behind a tree while it comes up the hill, and the book in his hand tells him it could eat a person in one bite (not much help, Jack thinks). It's the exciting kind of scary, and how he gets out of it is the best bit of the whole book.
There's a small mystery to chew on as well. Someone has been to dinosaur time before them and dropped a gold medallion with a fancy M on it. So who built the tree house?
If they're itching for more, The Knight at Dawn picks up the very next morning, with Jack and Annie creeping back to the woods before the sun is even up.
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