SuitabookCommunity and cooperation
Children flee to Dactyl Hill, join with the Vigilance Committee and work towards rescuing their friends, while Magdalys learns to function as part of a team.
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Book details
Daniel José Older - Author
This is a fast-moving historical-fantasy adventure about children protecting one another amid riots, forced separation and racial injustice, with dinosaurs adding imaginative energy to a serious setting.
IT’S 1863 AND DINOSAURS ROAM THE STREETS OF NEW YORK as the Civil War rages between raptor-mounted armies down South. Magdalys Roca and her friends from the Colored Orphan Asylum are on a field trip when the Draft Riots break out, and a number of their fellow orphans are kidnapped by an evil magistrate, Richard Riker. Magdalys and her friends flee to Brooklyn and settle in the Dactyl Hill neighborhood, where black and brown New Yorkers have set up an independent community–a safe haven from the threats of Manhattan. Together with the Vigilance Committee, they train to fly on dactylback, discover new friends and amazing dinosaurs, and plot to take down Riker. Can Magdalys and the squad rescue the rest of their friends before it’s too late?
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Sign in for personalised guidanceThis is a fast-moving historical-fantasy adventure about children protecting one another amid riots, forced separation and racial injustice, with dinosaurs adding imaginative energy to a serious setting.
Children flee to Dactyl Hill, join with the Vigilance Committee and work towards rescuing their friends, while Magdalys learns to function as part of a team.
The alternative 1863 setting includes Civil War conflict, New York riots, a Black and brown refuge, and threats against Black children.
The book includes riots, an orphanage burning, kidnapping, threatened enslavement, racial hostility, danger and a wounded sibling. These events may make the story emotionally intense despite its dinosaur adventure elements.
This is a grounded book brief while Suitabook strengthens the analysis: some draft conclusions still depend on unresolved evidence.
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Anything not established here remains open; it is not being treated as absent or safe.