$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 Eight of ten
The Far Map
Mars Quintero can send a message home. Nobody can send one back.
Mars is the one who goes out — nine days at a stretch, on a Gallimimus called Kettle, with a pterosaur in a basket who only ever flies one direction: home.
This time she finds something. All season, patches of the old world have been coming up gold in the valley, and Mars is the first person to notice that the roads bend around them — that three years of somebody else’s footprints have been quietly drawing a map nobody meant to draw. Fourteen of them. And when she lays them out, they point at the one place on the Far Map with nothing inside it.
Four miles downriver, in a flooded ballpark where every animal wears a steel collar and every child owes somebody an hour, the girl who runs the place has started reading the same ground.
The picture out of this one
A flooded ballpark lit green for a quarter of a second, four hundred hadrosaur nests below.
The spotlight
Mars Quintero
12, Far-scout
Far-scout. Out two days, four, once nine, and back with routes, water and where the patrols are walking. She keeps the Far Map: thirteen feet of paper, board and painted canvas.
Matched to Kettle, Gallimimus. Tall as a horse and steaming on cold mornings, which is the name. She will run all day, will not go through a doorway, and whistles about three seconds before she bolts.
In the back — Field Notes
Gallimimus
Gallimimus — how fast, how we estimate it, and why the estimate keeps moving.
In the back — Make It
A knotted cord and a pace-count map that gets you back to where you started.
Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
| Spotlight | Mars Quintero, 12, Far-scout |
| Reading age | Ages 9-12 · Grades 4-6 · grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story |
| Length | 22,416 words · eighteen chapters · a two-hour read |
| 5.5 x 8.5 in · Paperback, perfect bound, black-and-white interior · about 160 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 Seven, Say It Again · Book Nine, The Law of the Roost →
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 The Far Map?
Mars Quintero can send a message home. Nobody can send one back.
Who is it about?
Mars Quintero, 12, Far-scout. A flooded ballpark lit green for a quarter of a second, four hundred hadrosaur nests below.
How long is The Far Map?
About 22,416 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 Eight 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?
Gallimimus. Gallimimus — how fast, how we estimate it, and why the estimate keeps moving. 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 knotted cord and a pace-count map that gets you back to where you started. 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.
