$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 Six of ten
The Long Note
The valley’s last grazing has gone gold, and two hundred dinosaurs have eleven miles to walk before the river closes the door.
Tarn Beaufort, fourteen, runs the Green. He grows the food, he hauls the heavy things, and he knows exactly how many meals stand between this village and a hungry winter — a number he has never said out loud to anybody.
Now a patch of stopped time is standing on the meadow that feeds the whole herd. Everybody waited for it to go out, the way they always do, and it did not. So the animals have to be walked overland to new ground: a mud shelf that shuts behind them, one crossing in nine miles of rising river, and a gap in the hills with something enormous standing in it that will not move and cannot be gone around.
Big animals, big weather, and one boy who has to learn to ask out loud.
The picture out of this one
Two hundred animals standing a quarter-mile long in a river at dusk, inside a corridor made of two ropes.
The spotlight
Tarn Beaufort
14, Green
Green — food, hands, heavy work. He carries the calorie count of the whole village in his head and does not share it, and he arrives at every argument with something to eat.
Matched to Holly, Parasaurolophus. Eight feet of folded tube inside four and a half feet of crest, and a note that carries three miles over water. She counts the village’s children, and if one is missing she will not move.
In the back — Field Notes
Parasaurolophus
Parasaurolophus — the crest, the tube inside it, and the note it makes.
In the back — Make It
A bull-roarer out of a tub lid: a shape, some moving air, and no power at all.
Household junk, numbered steps, under thirty minutes, and a number the child writes down at the end.
| Spotlight | Tarn Beaufort, 14, Green |
| Reading age | Ages 9-12 · Grades 4-6 · grade 3–4 text under a grade 4–6 story |
| Length | 22,909 words · eighteen chapters · a two-hour read |
| 5.5 x 8.5 in · Paperback, perfect bound, black-and-white interior · page count not yet measured | |
| 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 Five, Nine Small Thieves · Book Seven, Say It Again →
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 Long Note?
The valley’s last grazing has gone gold, and two hundred dinosaurs have eleven miles to walk before the river closes the door.
Who is it about?
Tarn Beaufort, 14, Green. Two hundred animals standing a quarter-mile long in a river at dusk, inside a corridor made of two ropes.
How long is The Long Note?
About 22,909 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 Six 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?
Parasaurolophus. Parasaurolophus — the crest, the tube inside it, and the note it makes. 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 bull-roarer out of a tub lid: a shape, some moving air, and no power at all. 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.
