Children's Book Week: How to Milk a Dinocow by Ian Sands, Illus by Abby Davies

Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this book, free of charge, from the author,via Bostick Communications, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it

As promised, here is a children's book that we recently read and enjoyed!

Synopsis: If a freak milk accident that sparks life to a half cow, half stegosaurus isn’t weird enough, imagine how strange it’s going to get when Trip Stanley’s class starts drinking the milk! Trip Stanley’s best friend Jules spills a glass of creamery milk onto his uncle’s dinosaur machine and activates the contraption. A creature hatches and grows rapidly into a black and white spotted stegosaurus with and an udder. A stegcowsaurus. When the last bottle of creamery milk that Jules had planned to bring to school for show and tell is knocked over, Trip decides to milk the stegcowsaurus. 

Everyone in class is given a taste and the reaction causes spots and horns. One classmate even grows a tail. It’s up to Trip to figure out how to de-dinosaur his classmates and keep from getting kicked out of school, all while preventing his mom from discovering the stegcowsaurus in his bedroom. With angry classmates and an upset teacher in his living room, Trip finds a solution in his own advice, when life give you lemons you make lemonade. Realizing the correlation between milk and lemons, Trip reverses the beverages and changes his classmates back into classmates and his dinocow into a cow.

Review: This is an adorable book- Miss Grace laughed the whole way through. I read it to her over a week, a couple of chapters every night. She had fun trying to guess what was going to happen next to the kids and the 'dinocow'! AN older child would definitely love reading this book themselves and trying to guess how to solve the problem of telling Mom about a dinocow in her house! My only quibble was the cover, which didn't match the description of the dinocow in the book. But the illustrations were adorable in the book, and helped to illustrate what was going on in the book very well.

This would be a great book to encourage Summer reading!


About the Author As an active member of the Society of Children Books Writers and Illustrators, Ian Sands is always working on a new project. His chapter books, targeted toward third and fourth grade readers, are full of action with a witty edge that never lets the reader get too serious. Besides writing, Ian enjoys making art and stopping pucks as the goalie for his recreational hockey league. He currently teaches high school art in Apex, NC where he lives with his wife and three children. For more info on hisbooks, check out his website.