Plot or Premise

Six years after Jurassic Park turned into a human slaughter by rampaging dinosaurs during a storm, the chaos theorist Ian Malcolm is back to join a rich academic in visiting Site B, a nearby island that was the production facility for the original Park’s dinosaurs.

What I Liked

The story is a bit of a retread of the original, with a bit of added mystery of what happened at the site that is now long dormant. There is a bit new in the ways that the dinosaurs interact and less about “how” they were created from the first book.

What I Didn’t Like

I have three significant problems with the text. First and foremost, Ian Malcolm supposedly died during the first book, and I can overlook his resurrection for this book, except after having experienced severe trauma from being near dinosaurs, he voluntarily goes back into the dinosaur world with no obvious sense of fear or even foreboding. He’s almost as naïve as the original Hammond from book 1. Secondly, the book reads almost like a documentary on the feeding habits of a group of cows. There is virtually NO menace for the first 60% of the book. Ian knows better, the rest may not, but mostly it is just a bunch of aggressive dinosaurs walking past the humans with nary a sniff. Lastly, there is a giant “mystery” of how certain animals ended up in a specific nest area. They couldn’t have got there on their own and other dinosaurs couldn’t have lured or moved them there. But in the end, the blasé explanation of how the dinosaurs died doesn’t answer how they ended up where they did. Nor any other history of the island. It’s still well-written, but there are some gaping plot holes that make no sense at all.

The Bottom Line

Good writing but about as exciting as watching cows eat grass