Thoroughly enjoyed this adventure, where a time distortion brings bits of the Cretaceous (and other ages) to the present and sends bits of the present off to who-knows-when. People start digging out their children's dinosaur books to identify that creatures wandering down the street. Those who are unlucky enough to be in rural areas when the distortion takes place practice their running-and-hiding skills. There are a lot of (human) characters to keep track of--I had been reading a chapter or two on my lunch hour, but finally had to take the book home & finish it off to get smoother, less jerky sense of what was going on. I would recommend the more continuous read. But that was me, not the book.I thought the dinosaur behaviour was well depicted. I loved the nesting pleisiosaur, the apatosaurus that some ship-wrecked folks cling to and the general variety of dinosaurs that show up. It has made me wonder exactly how effective modern guns would be when dealing with large carnosaurs? They have pretty tiny brains and I wonder how useful head-shots would be? But, for the sake of the story, I was willing to suspend any questions that I had on that matter.This would have been a four-star book except for two complaints. 1) The Cretaceous areas that appear in our time have GRASS in them. [We are children of the grasslands, our ancestors having stood at the forest-edge, peering out onto the savannahs and wondering what life would be like out there--but grasses didn't appear until the Paleocene. Dinosaurs didn't eat them. We can barely imagine life without them]. 2) At one point, an injured theropod falls to its "knees." Dinosaurs, like modern birds, have legs in different proportions than mammals. What looks to us like a knee, is actually the ankle, bending the opposite direction of the knee. A theropod falling to its knees would actually be falling on its face, not what the author intended in the scene.Still, I enjoyed the book very much, despite my quibbles above. Three bloody, scary stars.
Another review for this book can be found at my blog: www.therealworldaccordingtosam.blogsp... A couple years ago, my parents picked up the sequel to this and bought it for me. Little did we know that a book came before. When I realized there was a prequel to my sequel, I went on a immediate quest which lasted about a year and a few months. Finally I found this book while on an out-of-town trip. Imagine my delight? I got dinosaurs, I got science, I got action, I got time rips.....somebody read my mind!I love dinosaurs and this book, while it took quite a while to get set up and bring me any good dino action, did deliver and give me plenty of dinosaurs later on. The only thing that was mildly troublesome, was the switching between so many characters and what was happening to them. Perhaps this was done on purpose to make me keep reading, and if so it worked. One minute I'm going nuts over whether Colter and Petra are gonna get to stay together then it goes over to Ellen and Angie and the meanie biker dudes.....and it takes me sometime to get to "Coltra" and I have to keep flipping ahead to see how far I am from certain characters that I wanna read about. Interrupted form one bit and riipped to another scene. It half-drove me crazy, but it strategically kept me in suspense so I can't complain too much about that. Just a author-reader ploy to make sure you keep the reader I'd bet. I'll keep that little trick in mind. Overall this book was pretty awesome, but I can only give it a 3 because it didn't go above and beyond and it left plenty of questions unanswered which leaves us to Thunder of Time to see what in the heck is going on. This one left too many unresolveds.....
What do You think about Footprints Of Thunder (1997)?
The quilt idea was unique and I would even say intriguing, but the follow-through was too aggressive. There were simply too many characters and scenarios, which left me uneasy ("Wait, which group is this?") and constantly pulled me out of the story. I found myself unable to care about what was happening to each and every one of the groups, mainly because from chapter to chapter I had to expend so much energy transitioning to someone or something new. In a way, I felt like I was watching a news program, giving humanitarian effort-style glimpses of the devastation around the country. If you get ambitious and throw in too much complexity, you're bound to leave loose ends. This book leaves the reader holding a frayed rope.
—Donna Backshall
"Footprints of Thunder" has everything you could ever want in a sci-fi thriller. Great action scenes, fast tempo, a multitude of different perspectives and characters to get acquainted with and enough science to keep you interested without leaving you quizzically holding the book saying "What did I just read?" The dinosaurs were heavily detailed and broadcast a wide scope of the creatures alive during the Cretaceous period. Stellar novel with plenty of literary "eye-candy" to dive into. The boisterous nature of this novel is quite amusing. Very fun read.
—Matt Garcia
Footprints of Thunder was an enjoyable read, filled with what it promised, modern humans dealing with dinosaurs. James David, takes the tried and true elements of Jurassic Park and explodes them to a global scale. This is post apocalyptic fiction, where the apocalypse is the emergence of Dinosaurs. It started off fast paced and delivered on the action. It gets extra points just for being dino scifi, but it does tend to bog down a bit in the middle, suffer from a few too many characters and a limited grasp of a big picture plot. But this isn't that kind of story, this is more about how this event effects a few lives, rather than how a few people manage to fix the event. It does lose points for me for falling into the tiresome gang of post apocalyptic rapists trope . We have man eating dinosaurs around and we still need the biggest threat to the female characters to be sexual assault? Apart from that, it was enjoyable enough to be a passable summer scifi thriller, a bit beyond the norm if you really like dinosaurs .
—Jeff Powers
