Told with strong rhythm and rhyme as you'd expect, this is another sturdy addition to the Donaldson stable. In a nutshell, there are two types of dinosaur living alongside each other, the duck-billed dinosaurs who are peace-loving and vegetarian and the T. Rexes who, obviously, aren't. By chance a duck-billed dinosaur egg ends up in the T. Rex nest and the grim and grisly mother T Rex hatches a rather drippy little specimen. T. Drip, as his sisters name him, runs away across the river where he finds a herd of duckbill dinosaurs and when his T Rex family come across the river to eat the duckbills, he saves the day. The illustrations are lovely, quirky and funky with cool expressions on the dinosaurs faces, though the colour palette is not as wide-ranging as some of the other Donaldson stories. With a slightly more detailed and slower paced story, I wonder whether the book is aimed at the slightly older child than Sharing a Shell, Room on The Broom and The Gruffalo? Make sure you have those first, and then add this to your bookshelf as you child's attention span develops. Perfect for the older preschooler and Key Stage 1 children.
And if you love the style of these illustrations, I throroughly recommend Little Red: A fizzingly good yarn which is a very different type of tale with equally appealing pictures by David Roberts.