Fans of boisterous bedtimes will get a high kick out of this fun, fantastical take on Drumheller’s dinosaurs. Thanks to Robert Heidbreder, winner of a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence and author of poetry and rhyming books for youngsters, Alberta’s prehistoric residents may become as distinct as they are extinct. Heidbreder lets readers in on the secret that, late at night, the bones of Drumheller’s dinosaurs emerge from the earth and reassemble into skeletons that party hearty on Alberta’s hoodoos. Respectful of its intended audience, the story has more in common with the wild rumpus of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are than it does with Night of the Living Dead. These dinosaurs don’t want to dine. They want to dance. And dance they do – to the irresistible refrain of “Boomity-Boom, Rattely-Clack, Thumpity-Thump, Whickety-Whack.”

Illustrators Bill Slavin and Esperança Melo evidently had a ball with the concept. A peek into a young boy’s dinosaur-themed bedroom sets the stage for subsequent scenes of dinosaurs who know how to get it together, literally and figuratively, on the dance floor. Acrylic paintings feature the dramatic orange-gold glow of sunset and sunrise, copper-red tones of the earth, and blue-through-plum shades of night. Attentive children may wonder, though, why the dinosaur mobile hanging over the boy’s bed disappears overnight.

Approached as a customary narrative, the text can be flat and awkward. However, readers who embrace the book’s performance spirit by snapping their fingers, hitting a groove, and setting a beat, will find that the rhyming lines – like the dinosaurs – “transmogrify.”