Snips and Snails and Puppy Dog Tales

Hell Pig, Killer Pack, Mammoth by Lou Cadle
Rating: Liked, Liked, Loved (Hated-Disliked-Okay-Liked-Loved)



In book one, a park ranger (Hannah) lead a class of a dozen advance science students, their teacher, and another fossil expert into a canyon on a fossil hunt, and by chance they stumbled onto a rip in time that sent them into the distant past, into prehistoric times. Every month that rip opens again, which means that through the series, they also moved through time.

As I said in my review of one of the earlier books, the author is an expert on survival situations, and that completely showed. All through the series, their struggle to survive was completely realistic and believable. With every jump, the group needed to quickly learn their new environment, how to hunt in it, find water, build a shelter, and just stay alive. In some of the times (like the final book), the environment was nearly harsh enough to kill them right off the bat. In other books, giant predators could kill them just as quickly.

The last book, Mammoth, had them time-jumping to a more modern time, which you would think after their adventures in prehistoric times would be boring, but it completely was not. Somehow it was just as interesting as those much older times!

Sadly, the author said book 5 is the end of the series, though he might write in this world again in the future. Fingers crossed!

I completely loved not just this whole series, but the author's writing in general. I started his next series, Grey, as soon as I finished this one last night.

It's only now that I'm writing this review that I realized two things:

* Because of how short these books were, I thought they were YA. Nope! They are seriously short though, maybe 2-3 hours of reading each. (YA books usually take me about 4 hours, adult books 6-8.)
* These books were self-published! WOW. Not just were they all very well written, the editing in them was outstanding. I found maybe four errors in the whole series, which is at least as good as traditionally published books. This is especially impressive when you know that he wrote and published all five of these books in a single year.