**SPOILERS: The following section will contain spoilers for the Jurassic Park book. You have been forewarned**
The book starts out with a family headed by Mike Boweman on a lovely vacation in Costa Rica. They go to this beach which is in the middle of nowhere so it is not crowded. The family lands on the beach and the little girl Tina decides to run off to explore. While exploring though the little girl was attacked by a bunch of small lizards. This event definitely surprised me because I really expected this book to be exactly like the movie. This event in the movies happened in the second movie, The Lost World. When they take her to the doctors office, Dr. Guitierrez says that based on the size of the bite marks and the drawing that Tina drew, these lizards were just normal lizards. But Tina insisted that Dr. Guitierrez was wrong and the things that were biting her were not normal lizards, so he went to the beach near where the attack occurred. He found a carcass of a small green lizard and decides to sent the carcass to Dr. Stone in Colombia. While Stone was analyzing it, one of the technicians said that it was a dinosaur, and that she knows because her kids love dinosaurs. This book so far is nothing like the movies ever were and its a change that I really like. I was surprised that this book started off like this and that the movie showed almost nothing from this first part at all.
Then the book cuts, to Alan Grant, a famous paleontologist. He is excavating a dinosaur nest in Montana. Grant and his colleague, Ellie Sattler, had to meet Bob Morris, who was investigating suspicious activities related to the Hammond Cooperation, the group who helped fund Grant's research. Hammond had only been funding cold-weather digs, has built a stockpile of amber, and leased an island off the shores of Costa Rica known as Isla Nublar. Morris has also found out that one of Hammond's company, known as InGen, has been gathering powerful computer and gene sequencing programs. The EPA is worried that InGen is engaging in irresponsible genetic engineering. Grant and Sattler can just laugh at this since Hammond is just a goofy old man who likes dinosaurs. Then later that day Grant gets a fax from Dr. Stone, showing him x-rays of the small lizard. Grant can't believe what he sees because he believes that it is a real dinosaur. Before he can start to comprehend what happened the phone rings. It was Hammond. He said that he wanted Grant and Ellie to go to his new preserve on Isla Nublar and that they would be payed $60,000 to further their research. The book to me was finally starting to get to be more like the movie, or vise versa. I really couldn't wait for this book to take off.
Grant and Sattler fly off to Isla Nublar as consultants for InGen. Hammond has also brought along another consultant, a mathmatician by the name of Ian Malcolm (who I might add is played by Jeff Goldblum and he is so awesome). They are also accompanied by Donald Gennaro, InGen's lawyer. Hammond give them plans for the island which seemed to consist of a resort and a giant zoo of some sort. Grant and Ellie arrive on the island and are sent to the resort. On the way Ellie notices some Jurassic fern which is poisonous sitting next to the swimming pool. Once they get to their rooms both Grant and Ellie notice additional bars that had not shown up on the construction plans. The bars were protecting the windows. This is the point in the book where you start to figure out everything that is going on on this island and all the secrets Hammond has been hiding.
Before the group departs on their tour of the island, a helicopter appers and off of it come a 11 year old boy and an 8 year old girl, who were Hammond's grandchildren, who inevitably annoy Gennaro. They then go to the labs where Dr. Wu, the head scientist at InGen, explains the process of making dinosaurs. They retrieve their DNA from biting insects who have sucked the blood of dinosaurs. The insects then somehow or another, were trapped in amber and have been preserved for thousands of years. They then show them the nursery where they see a baby velociraptor. Dr. Wu explains that to control breeding, the dinosaurs are sterilized and are engineered to all be female, but Malcolm isn't buying it because nature always finds a way. Malcolm asks Wu if they had engineered any of the dinosaur that had bitten Tina. Wu said that they had but they were engineered to be dependent on lysine and without it would die within twelve hours. This book at this point is when it finally started to take off for me at least.
They then visit the raptor cage where they see one raptor stalking them in front, then all of a sudden two of them come from each side, but were stopped by electric fences. In the control room, John Arnold, the chief engineer shows that all of the animals are closely watched and monitored by a variety of computerized methods. They said that 92% of the park was under surveillance so if anything did happen, it wouldn't take long for the people to find out. The tour of the island now begins. For a while they don't see any dinosaurs until they reach a heard of dilophosaurs and then they saw some triceratops. Then they reach the tyrannosaurus cage. They use a live goat to bait the t-rex, which appears and eats the animal. This t-rex encounter didn't happen until the power shut down in the movie, but I think that this is a better way to do things.
The minimal staff on Jurassic Park was a good thing yet at the same time it was bad. When Nedry, Hammond's son, takes 15 dinosaur embryos, he also shuts down the park so that he can escape on the last supply ship. But when he shuts down the power everything goes down, including the electric fences keeping the dinosaurs in their cages. So the tour cars stop at the t-rex cage. Tim, one of Hammond's grandchildren, sees that the t-rex has escaped. Malcolm does too because he gets out of his car and tries to run away, but is severely injured. Grant then get the children and flee the scene on foot. Muldoon, the parks game warden, finds Gennaro and goes to search for the others. They find the scene and Malcolm who is injured, so they take him back to the lab where Ellie and Dr.Harding can look at him. This scene in the movie is acted out perfectly and it spot on to what the book says.
Not long after that Arnold has the system running again and the power back up. Meanwhile, Grant and the kids find the visitors center narrowly escaping the grasp of the t-rex. There Grant finds proof that the dinosaurs have been breeding even though they were all female. When they got back to the lodge the power was still down and the raptors were free. While Arnold goes to the generator room to try and turn the power back on he is killed. They have the entire lodge surrounded. This forces Grant to leave the children alone while he turned back on the power. Meanwhile, Wu was killed trying to save Ellie and help give Grant more time. While on his way Grant finds Gennaro and turns the generator back on. Since everyone who knows their way around the computer is dead, Tim uses the computer to reactivate the electric fence. Tim calls the supply ship to come back because raptors have jumped aboard. While trying to find the raptor nest to figure out how many there were, Hammond fell and was eaten by small dinosaurs. Finally the National Guard show up and take everyone home. This book was very good. I expected it to be more like the movie in many ways, but it was not and I personally believe it was for the better.
Questions: 1) Did you enjoy the movie or the book better? Why? 2) Did you like that they killed off more main characters in the book than they did in the movie? 3) What would you want to see from the sequels that this book poroduced? 4) Which character was your favorite? Why? 5) If you could save the life of one character, who would it be and why?