I’m starting this review with an apology to Ms. Alene, the author. A couple days ago, when I was knee deep in this bizarro story of a monk who falls in love with a dinosaur, the very creatures he has dedicated his life to destroying, I saw a commercial for some BluRay thing or another and the movie shown in the ad was Avatar.

Try as I might, the visual of Avatar would not leave my head as I read this action-packed tale of a human (the monk) who falls in love with a blue creature (a trachodon). It didn’t help that in many ways the basic storyline was quite similar. Those similarities end there, however. What Love in the Time of Dinosaurs has that Avatar does not is dinosaurs who tote weapons like machine guns, samurai swords and rifles that fire massive rotating saw blades, and also superhuman monks who can lose more than 50% of their bodies and continue to fight on. So suck it, James Cameron.

The thing I liked the best about this story were the little touches, like the monks’ guns, which rendered dinos into hulks of smoking plastic shells. This made me think of the plastic dinosaur my son got from the Field Museum in Chicago this summer from one of those plastic dinosaur making vending machines. Like I said, nice, clever touches like that.

I will admit that Avatar was a fairly entertaining flick, but it would have vaulted into the awesome stratosphere if it had anything half as cool as a machine-gun carrying, grenade-lobbing Tyrannosaurus. So despite the similarities, Kirsten Alene wins this comparison with a heartfelt story that oozes the awesome. And the fact that the heros of the book, creatures formed by a union of the monks’ meditative thoughts and badgers from the forest, are named The Steve, well, that was just the icing on top.