This playful picture book encourages children to contemplate the "oodles of things you can do with a dinosaur" through a subtly ironic narrative that speaks directly to them. Two-page spreads capture the many hilarious scenarios that describe what to do should you happen to have a dinosaur. Have it blow your leaves, clear the snow, even babysit! When the narrator asks kids to consider what dinosaurs may not be good at, the story takes an even more comical turn. In the picture accompanying the warning to avoid asking your dinosaur to hold your popcorn bowl, two baby pterodactyls take flight and spill popcorn everywhere. Buried in all the rambunctious fun, the story leaves young ones with a message that can be applied to real-life situations: if you take the time to think critically and creatively, you can make effective and logical choices.

A boy proposes uses for a dinosaur (nutcracker, snowplow, etc.) "if you happen to have [one] lying around your living room." This book has an If You Give a Mouse a Cookie pattern, starting with the hypothetical title and concluding with the here-we-go-again ending, although the narrative is less story and more list. Witty and soberly outlandish in word and image.

A tongue-in-cheek look at some of the many ways that idle household dinosaurs can be put to work. Jack casts a host of cartoon dinosaurs—most of them humongous, nearly all smiling and candy bright of hue—in roles as can openers, potato mashers, yard sweepers, umbrellas on rainy days, snowplows, garbage collectors, and like helpers or labor savers. Even babysitters, though, as Bailey aptly notes, "not all dinosaurs are suited to this work." Still, "[t]he possibilities are amazing!" And even if there aren't any handy dinos around, she concludes, any live-in octopus, sasquatch, kangaroo or other creature can be likewise exploited. A bespectacled, woolly-haired boy who looks rather a lot like Weird Al Yankovic serves as dino-wrangler in chief, heading up a multiethnic cast of kids who enjoy the dinosaurs' services. As with all books of this ilk, the humor depends on subtextual visual irony. A group of kids happily flying pterosaur kites sets up a gag featuring a little boy holding a limp string tied to the tail of a grumpy-looking stegosaurus. Changes on this premise have been run over and over since Bernard Most's If the Dinosaurs Came Back (1978), and though this iteration doesn't have any fresh twists to offer, at least it's bright and breezy enough to ward off staleness. Well-trodden dino turf, but the grass is still fairly green. (Picture book. 4-6)