In the Time of Dinosaurs

Animorphs Megamorphs

De: K. A. Applegate

Narrado por: MacLeod Andrews, Michael Crouch, Ramón de Ocampo, Emily Ellet, Sisi Aisha Johnson, Adam Verner

We could blame everything that happened on Marco. He was the one who heard about the downed submarine. He was the one who thought we should check it out. And everyone knows that if Marco's up to a challenge, I'm definitely there.

Everything was going fine. Until the explosion. An explosion that blew us millions of years back in time, to the age of dinosaurs.

Now Tobias, Cassie, Marco, Ax, Jake and I are fighting for our lives with every step we take. But that's not our biggest problem.

Our biggest problem is we have no idea how to get back to our own time ...

©1998 Katherine Applegate. (P)2023 Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.

Great Narrators for a cool story, except S.A. Johnson

Sisi Aisha Johnson is really lackluster compared to the rest of the narration cast for Animorphs. If the first Animorphs book had been a Cassie book instead of a Jake one, I would have given up on the series right then. For this book, Johnson sounds like she had a head cold for the whole recording. Or maybe she was pinching her nose shut. Either way, she sounds particularly nasally.

The rest of the narrators are great! In fact, Macleod Andrews's performance in book one (The Invasion) is what sold me! Andrews, Ellet, Crouch, de Ocampo, and Verner are all fantastic at delivering not only their own respective characters, but also giving vocal variety for the other characters in ways that helps distinguish who is talking.

Johnson also does different voices for each of the other characters, except her voices are grating to listen to, as are her onomatopoeias.

As for the story, well, it wasn't as interesting as Megamorphs #1. Seeing how the gang dealt with being stuck in the Cretaceous period with no modern conveniences was an interesting twist on the typical Animorphs story arc. But then we get to the part with the aliens and we're back to modern conveniences. Just with dinosaurs thrown in.

Cassie being so overwhelmed by the T-rex morph was very harrowing. I really relate to her character and see a lot of my younger self in her. Cassie's struggle to reconcile her love for nature and animals with the inherent brutality of nature and animals is one I definitely can empathize with. I want to console her and offer her advice.

Which makes listening to her character chapters/books being narrated by someone who sounds like they have a C-clamp holding their nose shut really *really* frustrating.

25 years later, still a ton of fun.

While the pop culture references might be lost on kids these days (Marco wanting to change history so that 'Hanson' never exists), the story is still pretty solid, and deals with heavy issues for a piece of genre fluff. I read this in 8th grade and now my son is old enough to read it, I think he's going to get a kick out of it. I'm glad this series is getting a second life in the audio format.

An excellent side story

This story gets going pretty fast and doesn't stop! I love when they get all the voice actors to do reach chapter. Here's hoping they figure out a way to get all the VAs to do their roles all together in a story.