Read Jurassic World: Maisie Lockwood Adventures 1 – Off the Grid free for 7 days. £7.99/month after - less than a paperback.
Off the Grid is a Jurassic World adventure for 8 year olds by Tess Sharpe, about a girl in a camper van hunting for one particular raptor.
Dinosaurs are loose in the world now, and Maisie Lockwood is living out of an orange 1970s camper called Pumpkin with Claire and Owen. Two years on the road. No fixed address, no school, no telling anyone your real name.
People are looking for them. Maisie knows why, and she'd rather not think about it.
They find their jobs on police scanners and citizen band radio, getting to sightings before the poachers do. A herd of Triceratops settled in a valley. Brachiosauruses eating an entire almond orchard, which they shifted with speakers playing the sound of baby dinosaurs. Claire turns every single one of these into a lesson, which Maisie tolerates.
What Maisie actually wants is Blue. The raptor who protected her once, who is out there somewhere, and who will end up on a boat to the other side of the world if a poacher gets to her first.
Then they stop for milkshakes in a town called Gibson Peak and find three sheriff's cars outside the diner, a waitress who ran off up the mountain, and something enormous banging about in the bins round the back.
(Blue, it turns out, does not care for spaghetti.)
It moves like the films, which is exactly what your reader wants from it. Something screeches, somebody bolts, and the dinosaurs are funny one second and genuinely dangerous the next. Maisie is good company too, a bit reckless, always drawing, never quite doing what she's told.
Nobody gets eaten in front of you in these early chapters. The danger is real all the same. A grown man is frozen with fear while a raptor works out what to do about him, and Maisie ends up close enough to smell like lunch. It's tense in the way the films are tense.
It also assumes you know roughly who these people are. A child who has seen the films will be delighted. One who hasn't will still follow it, but they'll be doing a bit of catching up in the first chapter.
If it's the dinosaurs doing the work here, send them next to Knights vs Dinosaurs. Matt Phelan takes a knight who boasted at the Round Table about slaying forty dragons and puts him in front of the real thing, and the real thing has teeth.
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