Dactyl Hill Squad

Dactyl Hill Squad
Daniel Jose Older
Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic, 2018
260 pages
Grades 5-7
Fantasy

Orphan, Magdalys, and the rest of her friends from the Colored Orphan Asylum attend a performance of a black Shakespearean company during an alternative history of Civil War New York City: with DINOSAURS. During the performance, the draft riots break out and all becomes chaos. During the mayhem an evil police officer kidnaps some of the black orphans, planning to ship them down south and sell them into slavery. Magdalys and a few fellow orphans escape, along with the leads in the play, who have more fighting skills than anyone would guess. The small band escapes by dinosaur to Brooklyn after a brief stop at the orphanage to recover their files. They team up with fellow renegades, named The Vigilance Committee, who wish to recover the missing orphans and defeat the bad guys. Meanwhile, Magdalys realizes that she has a natural gift with dinosaurs and can communicate with them telepathically. Does she have what it takes to make a contribution in saving her friends? And who is this person whose name she finds in her files that could be the key to her past?

Dinosaurs are always cool and a real draw for kids, giving this middle grade book by a famous teen author a natural hook into readers. It is pretty easy to separate the fact from the fiction and Older sets the record straight in an extensive afterward in case there are any questions, so readers will walk away learning a thing or two about the Civil War era in New York. The action never flags and there are battle scenes aplenty, satisfying the video-game generation. I appreciate that the cast is diverse and we see the story from a perspective not often seen in history: a young orphan female of color. What I didn't love about the book is that there are so many characters I got confused keeping everyone straight and since they aren't particularly developed the job was even harder. Warning to parents: there is a lot of violence within the story and there are graphic deaths, making the book historically reflective of the time period, but also maybe too much for today’s sensitive readers. Another complaint is that the author infuses modern slang within the dialogue, such as "my bad", which I felt jarring, but may be just the ticket for modern reluctant readers. This may not be the best written book of 2018, but it is one of the most original and will be sure to find an audience, who will walk away having learned something, while being entertained in the process.