In Timothy Mason’s first novel, The Last Synapsid, we visit Faith, Colorado. It’s a quiet town, but this spring, a mysterious creature is lurking on the mountain. What is it, and what does it want? Only Rob and his best friend, Phoebe, are brave enough to investigate. What they find is the Last Synapsid—a squat, drooly creature that looks like a dinosaur crossed with a wienerdog—that claims to need Rob and Phoebe’s help. Having wandered into a time snag from his own era, 30 million years before the dinosaurs, “Sid” is chasing a violent carnivore called a gorgonopsid. The Gorgon refuses to return to his proper place in time. But if he doesn’t, history will re-align, humans will never evolve, and Rob and Phoebe will end up as nothing more than characters in an elderly synapsid’s dream.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit – it wasn’t what I expected, but turned out to be an interesting, well-crafted adventure mystery. I think my main misconceptions came from the too-juvenile looking cover on this book; it will appeal to elementary school students (girls, I think), but the characters are 12 & 13 and the complexity of the plot is definitely more in tune with middle grade readers. Rob & Phoebe, as well as the other kids who help Sid, all mature as the book progresses as they learn to work together towards a goal bigger than themselves. The fantastical elements were engaging; I particularly liked how Sid showed the kids that time & place are layered on top of each other and something you see now also has the magic, or grief, of what came before and what may come after. It poses some thought-provoking questions about humanity’s place in the evolutionary history of our planet, as well as of the nature of reality and friendship.
- Posted by Cori