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Faith, Colorado, doesn't get many visitors. But this spring, a mysterious creature is lurking on the mountain. Fiercer than a mountain lion, it's been hunting pets and leaving their remains scattered over the mountainside. But what is it, and what does it want? Only Rob and his best friend, Phoebe, are brave enough to investigate.

What they find on the mountain is the Last Synapsid--a squat, drooly creature that looks like a dinosaur crossed with a wienerdog--that claims to need Rob and Phoebe's help. Having wandered into a time snag from his own era, 30 million years before the dinosaurs, "Sid" is chasing a violent carnivore called a gorgonopsid. The Gorgon has become fascinated by humanity and refuses to return to his proper place in time. But if he doesn't, history will re-align, humans will never evolve, and Rob and Phoebe will end up as nothing more than characters in an elderly synapsid's dream.

Timothy Mason is a playwright who wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He lives in New York. The Last Synapsid is his first novel.

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1 Faith It was generally acknowledged around the tiny town of Faith, Colorado, that Phoebe Traylor had never seemed like the lying type. Her friend Rob Gates, certainly, but not Phoebe. That was before all this happened. By the time the whole thing wasover there weren't many in town who believed a word either one of them said. Even most of those who had actually seen "the creature" before he disappeared weren't buying it. Seeing isn't necessarily believing. Faith is a mining town that gave up mining long ago. Today it's a little straggly thing, half circled by a ring of toothy cliffs. Winter up there in the mountains, nearly nine thousand feet above sea level, gets pretty intense. Snow can start bucketing down as early as October. By the beginning of March, thirteen-year-old Phoebe was about cross-eyed with boredom. "What if spring never comes and it's just winter forever for the rest of time until the end of the universe?" she moaned. Phoebe and Rob were sitting in the school cafeteria, a cheesy pizza smell hanging in the air. Rob tore open the wrapper of an ice cream sandwich and said through a mouthful, "What if Faith never existed in the first place and all this is just somebody else's boring dream?" Phoebe was fair and freckled and a bit tall for her age. She had profoundly blue eyes. Her hair was the color of sand, and she wore it in a thick braid down her back, making her look--Scandinavian or medieval or, depending on how you felt about Phoebe--hopelessly old-fashioned. Her passion was animals,horses in particular. She thought she might want to become a veterinarian and spent a lot of time hanging out with the town's deaf vet, Janet Bright, who worked up at the Mitchelsons' stables with her deaf husband, Nick. Twelve-year-old Rob was short and skinny, with spiky dark brown hair and dark keen eyes. He wore jeans and T-shirts exclusively, and his hands and nails were almost always dirty. Rob would have denied having a passion, but he was always sketching--portraits, landscapes and sometimes rather unkind caricatures. He was fiercely left-handed. Their friendship was a fact of life in the tiny town of Faith. Rob-and-Phoebe had almost become one word. Their closeness hadn't been an issue when they were younger; now it could cause problems. At that moment, Chad Scudder, an eighth grader whom Rob called "Faith's own Ken doll," swaggered by their table, making kissing noises in their direction. Rob threw the uneaten portion of his ice cream sandwich at Chad and nailed him just under his chin. Mr. Brinkley, the boys' gym teacher, busted Rob instantly, and he got detention for the third time that month, which meant that his mom would have to come in for a conference. It wasn't a good winter for anyone. Now, though, the heavy snows were almost over. Phoebe and Rob couldn't have known it then, but as the temperature rose in the first weeks of March and the big melt began, a door on the mountain opened for the impossible to waddle through. Rob's mother, Lucy, had been on her own since Rob's father went missing six years earlier. Faith has a population of less than five hundred, but maybe two or three times a year somebody turns up gone, nobody knows where or why. The people who disappear usually just take off in the night, no forwarding address provided. Rob had been not quite seven years old when it happened, and in his mind it had to have been an accident--his father had climbed the mountain above town and fallen into one of the narrow cracks between the rocks. Or a mountain lion got him. Or he was rescuing a wounded mountain lion, maybe, carrying her in his arms down the mountain, when the two of them slipped into a crevasse. There are places in the peaks around Faith where if you take one wrong step, nobody'd ever hear you hit bottom. And there are mountain lions up there, although it's rare for anyone to see one. Anyway, if you ask Rob Gates what became of his dad, he'll tell you one story; if you ask him again next week, he'll tell you something altogether different. Lucy Gates waited tables at the diner on Main and on weekends took a shift behind the counter at the Conoco. She was in no mood for another school conference about Rob's attitude. "What's wrong with you?" she shrieked in front of everybody when Rob and Phoebe came into the diner that afternoon. "The phone rings, most likely it's gonna be the principal or the guidance counselor or the vice principal calling about some prank of yours or other. I'm sick of it, Robert, I am not kidding!" Pete the sheriff sat at the counter with a cup of coffee and a slice of lemon meringue; Adelaide and Wynola Parsons, the eighty-one-year-old twins who owned the oldest house in town, were having tea; and an alien was reading the local paper. (Aliens are what the kids called anybody who didn't live in Faith.) Everybody looked up to watch Rob get chewed out by his mom. "Well?" said Lucy. She was in her late thirties and had dark brown hair and eyes, just like Rob's. She was always broke and often angry. Not a lot of people in town knew that she played classical piano pretty well, but she did. Rob looked at his sneakers while Phoebe tried giving Lucy an apologetic smile. "You've got influence over him, Phoebe," said Rob's mom. "Use it, for goodness' sake!" "Yes, Mrs. Gates," said Phoebe. "Throwing food around the cafeteria!" "Sorry, Mrs. Gates," said Phoebe. Lucy slammed a tray of dishes onto a shelf behind the counter. "Robert?" "Sorry, Mom."   Excerpted from The Last Synapsid by Timothy Mason All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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School Library Journal Review

Gr 5-8-In the tiny mountain town of Faith, CO, nothing much happens. When pets start disappearing, Rob and Phoebe look for clues on a nearby trail and soon find themselves face to face with a synapsid. This Permian Era creature, whom they call Sid, tells them that he's found holes in time and can travel through them. But he is not alone: another synapsid, a Gorgonopsid, can do the same and is refusing to return to their own era, which would mean that the human race would never exist as he is the crucial link in the mammalian evolutionary chain. His fate and that of Faith are inextricably linked, and the kids travel through time to set things right while also dealing with a ruthless human villain who is using the Gorgon for his own ends. This is an exciting story, but with several plot holes. How the synapsids travel through time is only vaguely explained and seems almost magical, and the scientific aspects-particularly details about the creatures-are murky. Occasional instances of awkward phrasing are jarring, and the meandering story line is occasionally distracting. However, the relationships between the characters, especially Phoebe and Rob, ring true. The villain is greedy and evil, with enough menace to make his downfall appropriate. Sid's character is too good to be true, yet readers will root for him anyway. While not a must-purchase, this book is appropriate for larger collections.-Necia Blundy, Marlborough Public Library, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

Mammal-like reptiles called synapsids flourished before dinosaurs, more than 250 million years ago, but nearly all of them perished in the great Permian extinction. The intriguing premise of this tale is that two synapsids turn up in a failing silver-mining town in Colorado. It falls to middle-schoolers Phoebe and Rob to get them back to their own time, ensuring the development of human history. Both creatures speak but are otherwise different from each other. The herbivorous diictodon becomes a friend the humans call Sid; the carnivorous gorgonopsid attacks local dogs and horses. Complicating the pair's efforts is a time-traveling villain named Jenkins (known as FitzHugh a century earlier) who uses the gorgon in his own nefarious schemes. This strong story is almost buried beneath overdeveloped minor characters, musings about humankind's capacity to kill and to destroy the environment, and a convoluted subplot, in which a pair of elderly sisters stalk their ancestor, FitzHugh. The gorgon's Caliban-like situation is made explicit with quotations from The Tempest. Recommend this to readers who don't mind adventures told at a leisurely, discursive pace.--Isaacs, Kathleen Copyright 2009 Booklist

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TIMOTHY MASON is a playwright who wrote the book and lyrics for the Broadway musical version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! He lives in New York. The Last Synapsid is his first novel.


From the Trade Paperback edition.