Book Review: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
Title: The Wild Robot (The Wild Robot #1)
Author: Peter Brown
Release date: April 5th, 2016
If you have kids – heck, even if you don’t – you might’ve seen that The Wild Robot movie has recently come out and it came out to critical acclaim and audience love. On our end, our son turned eight at the end of August, but we’d not read the book, though it was on our radar. We’d seen the previews at movies for a while now, and we were all excited for the movie to arrive. During the first week of school or so, his teacher shared that she’d be reading the book to/with the class and that they’d be going to see the movie in theatre for a class field trip.
My son was super excited and practically begged us to get the book. We snagged a copy and dove in, pausing our other longer read, and immediately fell in love.
Now, before I get into the bread and butter here, this book is much like the movie Shrek, and what I mean is that it works perfectly as a fun story for kids, but as an adult, there’s plenty of darker/adulty moment throughout, so kudos to Peter for doing that.
What I liked: The book opens up with a container ship sinking and some of the sea cans onboard crashing into the shore of a remote island. All of the shipping containers are destroyed, save one, which is accidentally opened by some curious otters. Inside, is a robot, and with more curiosity, the otters approach and accidentally activate the robot, turning it on. It’s a Rozzum unit, known as Roz, and with Roz activated, thus begins the journey of a robot that is much deeper than even I expected.
Soon, an accident happens and Roz is left to nurture an egg, that then hatches and a small gosling is born. Imprinting Roz as their mother right away, Roz has to work with the other animals on the island – those who believed she was a monster to begin with – to help raise Brightbill and ultimately bring the animals of the island together in ways they never knew.
Roz is able to make fire. Build structures. Help grow better crops. And so on and so on. With Roz’s programmed information, she can make life easier, but it’s the personal side, the development of this soul within the machine that is the prize that Peter describes and when we get to the finale, where reconnaissance robots arrive to try and take Roz back, that we see how the island has become family, but also just how deeply touched we, as readers, have become.
What I didn’t like: Honestly, this book was perfect until the final few lines. It just felt meh. We got to such an emotional moment in the book, and at this point, I’m privileged because I know there’s two more books in the series, so it might’ve been different back when it was released, but the last few lines just didn’t have the emotional OOOMMPPHH I was expecting.
Why you should buy this: Chances are, if you’ve seen the trailer to the movie and thought this looked great, you’ve bought the book. OR, you’ve already bought it. OR you have a kid in the MG age group and their friends have read it and you’ve bought it. But, for those outliers who’ve not read it/bought it, prepare yourself for a wonderful story of discovery, learning, examining the world in different ways and how friends can look and be very different from yourself.
On the adult side, this story also examines the encroachment of automation and robotics into our world, which is impressive considering it’s almost ten years old and AI is being more and more of a hot button issue right now. But it’s done in a layered, subtle way, which worked to have a mildly growing tension throughout.
A phenomenal book and we’ve already grabbed book two so we can dive right in!
5/5
