A cute new transfer student usually causes a fair bit of commotion in high school, but when that transfer student happens to be a dinosaur who should have been extinct for the last 65 million years, that’s something else altogether. This wacky scenario forms the premise of Alan Cumyn’s latest YA novel, in which high school senior and student council president Shiels Krane sees her perfectly controlled life thrown totally out of whack when Pyke, a teenaged pterodactyl, lands at Vista View High.

Despite the fact that she’s competing with a dinosaur for readers’ attention, Shiels steals the show. Cumyn delves deeply into what makes highly driven Shiels tick, but he leaves Pyke irritatingly opaque, and fails to answer obvious questions: Why is Pyke attending high school with humans? Are there more pterodactyls (or other dinosaurs) out there? And how could he possibly still be alive?

Instead, Cumyn uses Pyke as the catalyst for Shiels’s transformation from a Type-A, ultra-organized control freak into a lustful teenager no longer sure of her path in life. Though Pyke can barely speak English, his inexplicable dinosaur charm enraptures Shiels and her classmate, Jocelyne, so thoroughly that after the girls grind with Pyke at a school dance, their noses turn purple to match the colour of Pyke’s fur. From that moment on, Shiels’s life begins to spin out of control, and while it’s fascinating to see just how undone this girl can become, the story otherwise runs dry by the middle of the book.

Without a doubt, this is an ambitious novel. Unfortunately, the path it takes to get to the substance of the story is too circuitous, resulting in several plot holes and an underwhelming ending.