Lollipop and Grandpa's Dinosaur Hunt

Lollipop and Grandpa are back!  This time they are having a family day out on the Jurassic Coast on a cold and windy day.  All the family is wrapped to the gills in scarves and coats – being terribly British – and when Grandpa explains that Jurassic means there are dinosaurs about (who ‘are very good at hiding’), he and Lollipop start off on a trek to find some.  And find them they do!  Grandpa’s imagination makes a Diplodocus become a Diggero-docus when a large yellow digger is spotted on the cliff top, and the stair they climb to the top of the cliff becomes a Stair-go-saurus (Stegosaurus).  And so it goes, with Lollipop taking pictures of each ferocious beast as they move along and totally believing in Grandpa’s imaginary animals.  When they get back to the rest of the family on the beach, her pictures don’t quite seem to match their adventures, but never mind, says Grandpa, dinosaurs are, after all, very good at hiding.  We learn something about dinosaurs along the way, and the pictures are great fun, with Grandpa’s spiky moustache and the long, skinny legs of all the family, but I was a little concerned that the so-called dinosaurs were a tad unclear in the illustrations.  I think children may need some help in seeing what Lollipop is seeing.  It’s a great story, though, of the wonderful relationship between a little girl and her Grandpa and just what a good imagination can do for that relationship.