Mayhem at the Museum
by Hannah Brückner; illus. by the author; trans. from German by Laura Watkinson
Primary    NorthSouth    40 pp.
9/25    9780735845855    $19.95

Things go awry at the Dinosaur Museum on a busy Thursday at closing time—with the coat check attendant’s parakeet making the rounds. A child named Yuri is balancing precariously on the guardrail near two large dinosaur skeletons when Yuri’s fear of birds leads to a “really big catastrophe!” While the child cowers at the sight of the immense pile of collapsed dinosaur bones, the second-person narration guides readers through a breathing exercise: “But then you calmly breathe in and out two hundred and eighty-three times. It takes a while, but it really does help to blow away the worst of your worries.” It also helps that all the visitors react with kindness. Soft illustrations with detailed line work capture the great scale of the museum and its dinosaur skeletons contrasted with the museum visitors and the tiny parakeet who flits from scene to scene. Smart page compositions rely partly on the museum architecture to visually tell the story, while the text helps mollify the general fear and embarrassment mistakes can produce. It takes all night, but by morning the museum-goers have helped put those dinosaur bones back together again, though arranged in a different way that pays homage to the parakeet’s heritage in the dinosaur world. Full of details to observe, this Swiss import manages to combine dinosaur drama with practical emotional support for persevering through embarrassing moments.

From the November/December 2025 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.