San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘DINOSAURS’
His research unearthed a reality different from what he’d been taught. The facts, in other words,
had changed.
and isolation? In the desert, he makes awkward efforts to connect, mentoring a fifth-grader who’s being bullied, volunteering at a women’s shelter as a “Friendly Man” and learning to identify native birds. He’s trying to be of use. He’s trying to avoid the fate of a fruitless scion: extinction.
But someone’s shooting the neighborhood wildlife in the night, and the couple next door are harboring secrets, despite their curtainless glass house. Gil’s grandmother, who raised him after his parents were killed by a drunken driver, advised him as a boy that you can’t change the facts. “All you can change is how you behave. In the face of them,” she said.
Pondering the area’s raptors and quail for his new hobby, Gil notes, “It was no longer held to be true that all the dinosaurs had gone extinct sixty-six million years ago, after the Chicxulub impactor made its crater in Mexico.” Birds were, in fact, the dinosaurs that survived.
His research unearthed a reality different from what he’d been taught. The facts, in other words, had changed.
In her 15 books, Millet has perfected charged, sciencebased prose that takes a surgeon’s loupe to how people interact with nature. Her 2020 eco-dystopian novel, “A Children’s Bible,” was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She also works as an editor for the Center for Biological Diversity, the Arizona-based environmental group.
Just as Gil is trying to rewrite his destiny, “Dinosaurs” asks whether we can redirect the climate catastrophe’s plot toward a different ending. In many ways, Millet’s latest novel rings a more hopeful note than her previous work. Let’s take that as a good sign.