A review by twistedflower2357
The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction, and the Beginning of Our World by Riley Black

adventurous emotional hopeful informative medium-paced

4.5

I simply adored this book. Black offers a fresh and unique perspective on the K-Pg extinction that, rather than getting caught up in the tragedy of one of Earth’s greatest losses, highlights the beautiful resilience of life. Her technique of weaving a fiction-adjacent narrative is novel and immersive—serving as both a gateway that inspires earnest imagination, and a built-in acknowledgement that our current understanding of the late Cretaceous and Paleocene periods will become increasingly outdated in 10, 20, 50 years (so why not commit to the picture we have now, filling in the gaps with extrapolation?). At some points while reading, I felt that this approach doesn’t go far enough, thinking “if this is meant to read like a fantasy novel, it reads like a very exposition-y one”. In these moments the prose seems to grind it’s gears a little too much, where additional environmental storytelling could have instead smoothed out the narrative. In that way, the central gimmick of the book fails to reach its full potential. 

That being said, Black’s perspective is too valuable and, honestly too magical, for me to say these flaws took away all that much from the experience. The concluding chapter drives home that this book isn’t just a Paleocene romp, but a heartfelt journey through grief and recovery—the grief that any dinosaur lover feels over the loss of this world. It definitely had me crying for reasons I couldn’t have predicted when I was picking the book up at the library. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested who is okay with working through a few more tangents than expected. 
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