Take Flight with Daniel José Older's Dactyl Hill Squad

Dactyl Hill Squad
written by Daniel José Older
published by Arthur A. Levine / Scholastic (2018)
next installment: Freedom Fire, May 2019

Magdalys felt like she’d discovered a whole new kind of saint over the course of the night, these brilliant, fearless heroes who looked like her and were ready to do anything to make the world what it should be instead of what it was.

Welcome to the mind of Daniel José Older. You’ll be glad you made the visit. In Older’s mind – and in the pages of his first middle grade novel (and first of a series) Dactyl Hill Squad – dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures exist alongside humans. In 1863, during the height of the Civil War.

And they don’t merely exist alongside people in some kind of benevolent coexistence. People – as they are wont to do – have managed to harness the power of the dinos. They’re a means of locomotion; people commute into Manhattan by dinosaur. (Danny and the Dinosaur, anyone?) They’re workhorses of several industries. And they’re a weapon of war; the Union and Confederate armies each have an arsenal of dinos deployed to the battlefield.

But they’re still wild, mostly untamed creatures whose power is barely contained by the people “controlling” them. Until Magdalys Roca starts to hear them in her head.

I’m on record as saying that Daniel José Older is one of the most exciting literary voices I’ve personally discovered in the past year. (Check out my conversation with Older on The Great Big Beautiful Podcast right here.)

He’s is the best-selling author of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series and the young adult series the Shadowshaper Cypher. He also wrote my favorite of the 40 stories in the Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View. (Check out my review here.)

In Dactyl Hill Squad, Older introduces us to a band of resident kids at Manhattan’s Colored Orphan Asylum. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. Just because dinosaurs exist in this world and are no big deal, this isn’t a fantasy. Being an orphan and a person of color still means you’re at a serious social disadvantage.

It was only a few years ago that New York has passed a law granting black citizens the right to dinoride, and white people in Manhattan still bristled and stared when they saw someone with brown skin astride those massive scaly backs.

Our protagonist, Magdalys Roca, is searching for any information she can find about her family. She knows that her older brother, Montez, is fighting for the Union army and was wounded in the battle of Vicksburg. But that’s about it. Her two sisters were mysteriously taken away from the orphanage several years prior by a stranger and ferried back to Cuba. The rest of her story – who she is – isn’t much more than a hovering question mark.

Yes, there are dinosaurs here. But by focusing on a community that typically gets forgotten in discussions of the Civil War era, Older shines a spotlight on the class struggles and discrimination that were all too prevalent in New York (and throughout the northern states).

Older infuses Magdalys’s story with just the right mixture of history and fantasy. Many elements of his 1863 Manhattan (and Brooklyn) are real. We see the daily struggles of people occupying the margins of society and just trying to get by. We see the New York Draft Riots (which really took place in July 1863). We witness a lynching. We get a glimpse of the Vigilance Committee and the work they did to protect both free blacks and runaway slaves. We see the ugly face of Richard Riker (and others like him) who organized a Kidnapping Club with the sole purpose of kidnapping people of color and selling them into a life of slavery.

It’s heavy stuff for a middle grade novel, to be sure, and parts of it might be too much for some more sensitive readers. But remember: dinosaurs! Older does an admirable job of using dinos and other prehistoric beasts to imbue the story with a ridiculous amount of fun and a genuine spirit of adventure.

Being a squad, with a name and everything, had changed the game. They weren’t just abandoned orphans anymore – they were part of something.

This first book of a planned series introduces the sizable cast of characters, sets up the eponymous Dactyl Hill Squad, and sees Magdalys and her friends rise up and fight against Riker and the injustice they see around them. Though we get a satisfying conclusion, it also nicely sets the stage for the second book.

If I had to lodge a complaint, it would be that the characters speak in a dialect and lingo that is more 2018 than 1863. Older does this intentionally because he didn’t want conversations to be distracting, but I found a few instances of 21st century slang took me out of the 1860s. But that’s a minor complaint.

The book also has one of the best introductions of a character ever. Trust me, you’ll fall in love with Miss Josephine Du Monde almost immediately.

Plus, mosasaurus. Oh yeah.