What to read this week

“I’m Rory, sometimes Roary Rory, and this is the story of the weirdest week of my life. Well, the weirdest week so far. Probably. I mean the week I was born was probably quite weird for me. But, I don’t remember that. ankfully. Anyway, SPOILER ALERT, this week’s weirdness starts on Monday, when I am accidentally turned into a dinosaur...”

Rory has been turned into a ridiculous, small, feathered dinosaur.

Pretty awkward.

He can’t use a human toilet. He can’t hold a video game controller in his little dino claws. His breath smells really bad. And his new carnivore body can’t stop craving sausages.

Rory nally gets his friends to take his embarrassing situation seriously, and together they embark on Operation Make Rory Human Again.

e author is Jen Wallace from Cork, who is very keen to include neurodivergent voices in children’s writing. Talking about Dinosaur Pie, she says: “ is book started out as a cunning ploy to get my kids to eat their dinner (‘Is it really dinosaur pie, Mum?’) en it became a poem for a few years. It enjoyed that but it began to dream of being a book. So it pestered me and pestered me and eventually I helped it become this book.” Jen was diagnosed with both ADHD and autism late in life, and she loves to write neurodivergent characters so people like her can see themselves in books. Jen continues: “I populated it with neurodivergent characters because those are the people I know best. So you will see some of my autistic traits and some of my ADHD traits in the characters. I think this is important because there are neurodivergent children in every school and community, so of course they must be in the books children read, even books that started out as dinners!”