$8.99 paperback, when it opens
Not on sale yet. Nothing here has cleared the publisher’s own gate: no volume has a typeset interior, a print wrap, or an ISBN in either format, and the ebook price has not been ruled. Every free page on this site is finished and true — the whole first chapter, ten Field Notes, ten builds — and the shop opens when the books do. Write to orders@dinoroost.com to be told when.
Dinoroost · Book Five of ten
Nine Small Thieves
Forty kids, four spoons left, and nine chicken-sized dinosaurs who have been sneaking out at night.
Pia Marchetti is nine, and she is not little, she is narrow — the difference is that she fits. She runs the Small, the eleven youngest kids in a village built two hundred feet up in seven impossible trees. She also runs the Tick-Tocks: nine Compsognathus who sound like a bag of dropped cutlery, answer to nobody, and have been stealing the last of the Roost’s spoons.
When Pia works out where they have been going, it is two miles up-valley: a hundred acres of cracked grey mud where somebody once grew plants under glass by the acre. Six long greenhouses stripped down to bare steel hoops. A water tank on stilts with four letters left on the side. There is no roof over any of it, and Pia has exactly one rule about places with no roof.
There is also a ruling from the Ledger about where kids under ten are allowed to go.
The picture out of this one
A roof that walks — children hauling cloth onto bare greenhouse hoops, one bay at a time.
The spotlight
Pia Marchetti
9, runs the Small
Runs the eleven Small and nine chicken-sized dinosaurs, out of a bucket holding snacks, string, a whistle, four beetles and a list. “I’m not little, I’m narrow. The difference is I fit.”
Matched to The Tick-Tocks, Compsognathus × 9. A yard long, three pounds, mostly tail, each tail painted a different color of salvaged nail polish. One clicks and nine synchronise inside four seconds.
In the back — Field Notes
Compsognathus
Compsognathus — one of very few small theropods with published scale impressions.
In the back — Make It
Sending something light up first, and letting it drag the heavy thing after it.
Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
| Spotlight | Pia Marchetti, 9, runs the Small |
| Reading age | Ages 9-12 · Grades 4-6 · grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story |
| Length | 22,526 words · eighteen chapters · a two-hour read |
| 5.5 x 8.5 in · Paperback, perfect bound, black-and-white interior · about 176 pages, not yet confirmed from a proof | |
| Paperback ISBN | not yet issued |
| EPUB ISBN | not yet issued |
| Illustrations | None yet — text and cover |
| Content | Peril yes, cruelty no. No child dies, no swearing, no romance, and nothing anybody builds is meant to hurt anyone |
| Written by | Jory Hark — a pen name |
← Book Four, The Collar and the Key · Book Six, The Long Note →
Questions about this one
Eight answers,
from this book’s own file.
Every one of these is a fact out of the manuscript or the catalogue rather than a sales line — the measured word count, the drawings that actually exist, the animal on the nonfiction page at the back.
What happens in Nine Small Thieves?
Forty kids, four spoons left, and nine chicken-sized dinosaurs who have been sneaking out at night.
Who is it about?
Pia Marchetti, 9, runs the Small. A roof that walks — children hauling cloth onto bare greenhouse hoops, one bay at a time.
How long is Nine Small Thieves?
About 22,526 words across eighteen chapters, a cold open and a tag - roughly a two-hour read for a confident reader in the 9-12 band.
Is it illustrated?
Not yet. This volume ships with a cover and no interior drawings; Books One, Two and Three have eighteen each.
Do I have to read the others first?
Reading order is publication order, and there is no other order. This is Book Five of ten, and it closes its own problem, so it can be read on its own - but the season runs a clock under all ten and it reads better in order.
What is the nonfiction page at the back?
Compsognathus. Compsognathus — one of very few small theropods with published scale impressions. The page names its own sources and says which parts of the story were invented, and it is free to read on this site.
What do you build at the back?
Sending something light up first, and letting it drag the heavy thing after it. Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
Is anything in it frightening?
Peril yes, cruelty no. No child dies, there is no swearing and no romance, and nothing anybody builds in these books is meant to hurt anyone - that last one is the first of the three Laws the series runs on.
