I bought this book nearly three years ago, during an annual book sale called Big Bad Wolf. I was in my first year of uni. It was fantastic. Anyway.

I haven’t got the chance to read this because 1) this book is thick, and 2) I got a reading slump. Normally, I can finish a thick book in a span of a week. Actually I’ve tried to read this several times, but because of the slump, I don’t even get past chapter 2. This time, though, I don’t know what has possessed me, but I finished the book in less than two weeks! This is such an achievement.

The Dinosaur Feather is a crime novel, or so it called on the back blurb, revolving around our protagonist, Anna Bella, and her dissertation about a debate whether birds are considered dinosaurs or not. And then her supervisor is dead. And since her spv is annoying (according to her), all Anna cares about is how she will defend her dissertation after the chaos of his death, hahaha! She says, “sort your priority right.”

Aside from Anna Bella, we also get several people’s POV—the detective and one of the deceased’s rivals. Their POVs give us additional information, too much additional information, honestly.

You can check its complete synopsis and reviews from other Goodreads users here.

Reading Process

Three years later, after I initially bought the book, I realized why I gave up reading this: 1) the first chapter fails to engage me, a point which I would discuss later in the cons section, 2) it whips out a lot of scientific jargon, which they explain, but it quickly becomes a turn off to my reading-slump-self. I bear myself to read past chapter 3, and it gets more interesting after that.

There are still jargons inside; a lot of academia phrases that I think I wouldn’t find in a fiction book elsewhere, but I read through it, because I was ‘recovering’ after reading historical fiction and in need of something ‘light’. I wouldn’t say a crime novel full of anthropological terms is light—but hey, at least it didn’t give me a historical-fiction-kind of headache.

What Makes Me “Oho!”

I was almost halfway through the book when I realized that this book is written in the third POV, and I was ecstatic. Most books I’ve read in 2022 so far are written in the first person POV, and I don’t really like it. I mean, I don’t want to put myself as the main character—I just want to observe.

Anyway. I like how this book is set in an academic setting, even though according to a certain Goodreads reviewer, it isn’t accurate. The epilogue is actually Anna Bella defending her thesis! It’s hilarious, but in a good way.

The crime itself is okay-ish. When I read it, I wasn’t in the head to scrutinize every detail and try to make sense of everything: I just want to take a break from historical fiction books (and that was probably why I also read another crime story after finishing this one.)

I don’t think the overall story fits the claim, since most of the pages are filled with the character’s backstory rather than solving the crime itself. There’s a subgenre of crime called cozy mystery, but I don’t think this book fits into that category as well. Perhaps melodrama fits the best? Maybe.

What Makes Me “Uh…”

This book’s first chapter is definitely not the best opening line I’ve read. It even goes as far as explaining the title—the debate whether birds are considered dinosaurs or not—but it feels like a dump of information, and it did not do great when I was in a reading slump three years ago.

Still in the topic of scientific jargon, there is a scene where Anna Bella is brainstorming the topic of her thesis with her friend, and they discuss a bunch of theories, and I actually don’t follow. I admit that this is on me, because I don’t really want to rack my brain that hard to understand all the discourse and theories. It’s still enjoyable, though. I get to read something that I wouldn’t read normally.

Moving onto the character: there is a detective character here, but he does not solve the murder. Instead, it’s the main character, Anna Bella, who discovered the murderers! Yes, plural. 

Spoiler alert, there are two culprits in this book, and Anna Bella knew both in less than a week, if I’m not mistaken. It’s ridiculous how she even set up a trap, and all the detective needs to do is pick the culprit up, handcuffed by Anna, while she goes to see the second culprit. Well, the MC doing all the heroic things is acceptable, but not if the introduction to this detective character is this good,

He was Denmark’s youngest police superintendent, basd at Copenhagen’s Police Department A, Station 3 in Bellahoj. It was well known that Soren had risen quickly through the ranks because he could “knit backward” as he called it. He possessed an extraordinary eye for the true nature of things, and many of the most spectacular conclusions reached in Department A had been achieved by Soren. At the age of thirty he had been promoted to superintendent.

Gazan, The Dinosaur Feather, page 36

This is literally in the first paragraph introducing our dear detective, Soren. Perhaps this is a sarcasm, perhaps it is not, I have no idea, because the whole chapter will discuss him failing to be a decent lover to his current girlfriend, impregnating another girl who is not his girlfriend, and then leaving them because he did not want a child. What a character.

Overall,

If you are looking for a proper crime, detective story, I probably won’t recommend this one. I don’t think crime is the main topic here; the book focuses more on the character’s internal conflicts rather than the mystery.

Yet if you are looking for a new, out of the box kind of story, I’ll probably let you borrow my copy of this. It’s enjoyable, as long as you don’t think too hard, ahahaha. I don’t expect myself to actually finish the book in less than two weeks! The official rating is 3,5 out of 5, but it’s 3 stars in Goodreads.

See ya on the next review 😀