As someone who was obsessed with dinosaurs as a kid, loved Jurassic Park, and wanted to be a Paleontologist, I cannot believe it took me until the age of 31 to actually read it. The first half of the book is very similar to the Jurassic Park movie. The movie only made a few changes from the book in that aspect, such as making the girl be the older sibling, where it's the opposite in the book. You can immediately recognize the characters from the movie in the book, so I actually think the movie did quite well in putting them onscreen.

Reading the second half of the book really showed me how the rest of the movies took scenes to use later on. It definitely looks like every Jurassic Park/World movie has scenes that are directly inspired from the first book, which I like. I also believe the changes that the first Jurassic Park movie made are actually good, so this is a rare situation where both the book and the movie are fantastic ! I still think the Jurassic World movies should have never been made though...

As for the book itself, it hooked me right away, but it quickly slowed down, and it takes about 150 pages for us to actually get to the island and see some dinosaurs. If you dislike technical explanations, computer code chatter, and chaos theory, then you will not enjoy this book. It does actually try to explain everything that is happening and why, so there are images of code strings, and things like that.

As expected, the dinosaurs are awesome. I think loving dinosaurs so much as a kid really helped in picturing what was happening on the page. I do think we could have gotten to them a bit faster, but by the time we did the world building was finished, so we could just jump in and run with (or away from) them.

Overall this was a great read that I am kicking myself in waiting so long to pick up. Teenage me would have probably loved this even more than current me !