Nick and Tesla’s Robot Army Rampage

Bob Pflugfelder and Steve Hockensmith's Nick and Tesla's Robot Army Rampage is a gadget-packed mystery for 10 year olds about a stolen comic and a lot of homemade robots.

What happens

Nick and Tesla are eleven-year-old twins, dumped for the summer with their Uncle Newt while their parents study soybean irrigation in Uzbekistan. Nick had never liked soybeans. Now he hates them.

Uncle Newt is an inventor. His compost-powered vacuum cleaner explodes before breakfast and fills the house with smoke that smells of burnt banana. His car runs on old chip fat, so dogs chase it down the street.

Then the twins' friend Silas turns up in a panic. His dad's comic shop is about to go under, he had found one very rare comic that would have saved it, and now the comic has gone. The shop was locked all night. The spare keys were still hidden where only three people knew to look.

So the twins start asking questions. Tesla charges in first and Nick follows, worrying.

What's lovely about this one is how much it hands over to your reader. The story stops now and then to show you exactly how to build the robots the twins are building, with a proper list of what you need (a computer fan, four coat hangers, a bit of hot glue) and numbered steps. Whether that turns into an actual afternoon at your kitchen table is another matter, but the offer is there!

The twins are good company too. They bet each other five million dollars over who builds the better robot. Nick already owes Tesla twenty-one million. Underneath the jokes, though, they're both quietly checking the phone for messages from parents who haven't rung in a fortnight, and the book lets that sit there without making a meal of it.

This is number two in the Nick and Tesla books, and number one isn't in the library. That matters less than you might think, because everything gets explained again as you go.

What to read next

If your reader takes to these two and wants another job for them, Nick and Tesla's Super-Cyborg Gadget Glove is here. This time it's a science museum where the robot models of famous scientists have started going badly wrong, hours before the grand reopening.