The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Dinosaur Hunter by Tim Collins is a funny history story for 9 year olds, told by a girl who is brilliant at finding fossils and hopeless at being taken seriously.<\/p>\n
Ann lives on the coast in Victorian England and spends her mornings splitting rocks open with a hammer. What she finds are the bones of enormous sea creatures. What her father does with them is sell them to holidaymakers as a cure for colds, bad backs and, on one memorable occasion, untidiness.<\/p>\n
Ann knows the bones matter. She’s read the journals. She’s worked out that these animals swam here an extremely long time ago. Nobody listens, because she’s a girl, she’s poor, and her father is standing beside her shouting about lumbago.<\/p>\n
Then a scruffy man in a crumpled jacket steps off the coach from Bath and pays four times the asking price, because he knows exactly what the bones are.<\/p>\n
The diary format is what makes it. You get Ann’s plans, her sulks and her total certainty that she is cursed. (She once tripped and dropped a handful of fossils into a famous scientist’s soup. He did not take it well.) Her terrible luck is the running joke and she tells it on herself with a very straight face.<\/p>\n
Scattered through are GET REAL boxes with the real science. What a Plesiosaur actually was. Where the word dinosaur comes from and what it was meant to mean. They’re short, they’re funny, and they never feel like homework.<\/p>\n
One thing to mention. Ann is fourteen, so your reader is following someone a good deal older than them, though the writing is aimed squarely at younger readers and never feels like a teenage book. The village poverty sits in the background too, with neighbours going days without food and a wrecked ship’s barrels being shared out quietly.<\/p>\n
If you’ve got a reader who likes facts smuggled inside a story, this will suit them nicely. Tim Collins has done this for several hopeless historical figures, and the World’s Worst Knight is in the library as well. That diary belongs to a squire who is certain he will be the bravest knight who ever lived, and who currently rates himself one out of three.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Dinosaur Hunter by Tim Collins is a funny history story for 9 year olds, told by a girl who is brilliant at finding fossils and hopeless at being taken seriously. Ann lives on the coast in Victorian England and spends her mornings splitting rocks open with a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11635,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":9204,"lr_next_read_anchor":"the World's Worst Knight","lr_seo_hook":"A Victorian fossil hunter with brilliant finds and spectacularly bad luck."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[24],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[976],"class_list":["post-9203","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-9-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-tim-collins"],"yoast_title":"The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Dinosaur Hunter by Tim Collins | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A Victorian fossil hunter with brilliant finds and spectacularly bad luck. For ages 9+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n