$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 Seven of ten
Say It Again
For three years the radios have given one word at a time. Tonight they give up seventeen seconds, and a voice.
Wren Adeyemi is eleven, and she keeps the Ear — the loft at the top of a two-hundred-foot tree where the Roost listens for the grown-ups who vanished. She is alone when it happens, at two in the morning, with the whole valley gone gold underneath her. And sitting three feet from her elbow is a small four-winged dinosaur who can say one word in a grown-up’s voice, and says it when he is happy.
By morning the bird is saying it too. Nobody in the village can prove which of them spoke first, and after four days of trying, neither can Wren. So she stops trying to win the argument and starts building something better instead — two listeners, two books, and a night watch that can be wrong out loud and survive it.
The picture out of this one
The whole valley gone gold, its top edge dead straight, stopping just below the village decks.
The spotlight
Wren Adeyemi
11, the Ear
Keeps the Ear: forty-one salvaged speakers on a rack over the water, powered by whoever is listening pedalling a bicycle. She takes the watch nobody else wants.
Matched to Parrot, Microraptor. Four wings and two pounds. He copies the bell, a door hinge and Tarn’s cough, always at the worst moment, and in rain he becomes a wet sock and sulks for hours.
In the back — Field Notes
Microraptor
Microraptor — four wings, and the fossil that told us what colour it was.
In the back — Make It
A two-cup line. Sound is a shove travelling through something, and tight string carries it.
Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
| Spotlight | Wren Adeyemi, 11, the Ear |
| Reading age | Ages 9-12 · Grades 4-6 · grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story |
| Length | 22,947 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 |
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 Say It Again?
For three years the radios have given one word at a time. Tonight they give up seventeen seconds, and a voice.
Who is it about?
Wren Adeyemi, 11, the Ear. The whole valley gone gold, its top edge dead straight, stopping just below the village decks.
How long is Say It Again?
About 22,947 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 Seven 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?
Microraptor. Microraptor — four wings, and the fossil that told us what colour it was. 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?
A two-cup line. Sound is a shove travelling through something, and tight string carries 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.
