Budding readers and dinosaur lovers will probably try some backyard excavation afterward. Most beginning readers won't care that the independent scholar's fossil hunter wins out over the Yale University team, but George, the boy who finds the skeleton, is believable in his dreams of scoring big with a dinosaur find, and also in his sense that one grown-up is trying to cheat him because he's only a boy. Set in Wyoming in the 1880s, the story tells of a young boy whose find of a triceratops skeleton is sought by competing collectors. Here's historical material in a chapter book for beginning readers a bit beyond the basic bears and bunnies. Lise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Plains-Ojibway, does an excellent job with what we know and what we don't.īy Elaine Marie Alphin, pictures by Don Bolognese The decision to join the expedition was not hers, yet her contributions to it were varied and important. Though her girlhood among the Shoshone and later among the Hidatsa is detailed in ways that make clear how different those two worlds were (the Shoshone were seasonally nomadic the Hidatsa cultivated crops and traded), the main emphasis is that by the time her life became joined with that of the expedition, she was married and expecting her first child. She was neither a cheerleader for Thomas Jefferson's westward expansion plans nor a helpful little girl tagging along. This one does an excellent job of revealing all the complexities of the Shoshone woman Sacagawea. The upcoming Lewis and Clark bicentennial will result in a number of children's books about different members of that expedition.

Thunder Rose by Jerdine Nolen