They stow themselves away and end up on the island with a small group of adult scientists. Except perhaps for a smattering of profanity, this story would be appropriate for an eager YA reader. Two middle schoolers who have made connections with a well-known paleontologist get wind of his plans to investigate the Jurassic Park island when he realizes that some dinosaurs have lived on. Now thousands of YA books do something similar with their young protagonists.Įven though The Lost World is written for adults (for a chuckle, see what Crichton wrote about Jurassic Park here), kids play an important role.

Ditto with Nancy Drew whose father was a famous defense attorney. The Hardy Boys solved their mysteries because they somehow always got involved with cases their father, a famous private detective, was working on. Still, in the twentieth century this became a standard. The tradition perhaps goes back to stories like Treasure Island and Captains Courageous, and one could even make a case for David in the Bible or Telemachus in the Odyssey. Young readers or readers who were young once probably recall reading elementary or young adult novels where the protagonists are children who get involved in situations with adults and help solve the mystery or problem in the story. There are a few interesting things woven into the story. Readers will enthusiastically keep the pages turning.

The dinosaurs have gotten wilder: Nearly all the surviving lizards after the 1989 Jurassic Park disaster are predators. Two groups of people land on the island at the same time to study the dinosaurs, but they have cross purposes. The Lost World is set five years later, so the tale contains 1994 technology. The first was Jurassic Park, where an attempt to monetize the discovery into a traveler’s destination (think the Galapagos Islands) turned into a nightmare. The Lost World is the second novel Michael Crichton wrote about the reconstituted dinosaurs on the fictional island off the coast of Costa Rica.

The lost world crichton novel