The Wild Robot

Peter Brown's The Wild Robot is an island survival story for 8 year olds, except that the one doing the surviving is a robot.

What happens

A cargo ship goes down in a hurricane. Five crates wash up on a wild, rocky island. Four burst open on the rocks and the robots inside are smashed to pieces, which is how the shore ends up scattered with robot arms and legs and a head in a tide pool. The fifth crate lands on a ledge. A gang of sea otters climbs on top of it, tears at the packing foam, and one paw accidentally hits a button on the back of a robot's head.

Her name is Roz. She does not know where she is.

What follows is a machine trying to learn the wilderness from scratch. She works out how to climb a cliff by watching a crab. She gets chased up a tree by two young bears and cannot fight back, because her programming will not allow it, so she pelts them with pinecones until they are too annoyed to keep going.

Then a stick insect gives her the idea that works. Roz smears herself in mud, plants ferns and grasses in it, puts flowers over her glowing eyes, and sits in a clearing for weeks as a tuft of vegetation, watching and listening.

By the end of it she can understand what the animals are saying. It turns out the chickadees have been singing about what a lovely day it is.

The animals want nothing to do with her.

Peter Brown does not soften the wilderness, and a tender reader will feel it. A fox goes for a porcupine's throat, misses, and has to have the quills pulled out of his face one at a time. Vultures hunch over carcasses. And the turn the whole book rests on is an accident. Roz brings down a rockfall and finds two dead geese and four smashed eggs in the rubble, and then one last egg peeping for its mother. She caused it, the book says so plainly, and it does not let her off.

None of that is a twist. It is the reason the book exists, and it comes early enough to read that far first.

Reading it is unusual and very easy. The chapters are very short and some are only a few lines long. The narrator talks straight to you, tells you things Roz cannot know, and keeps reminding you that robots do not feel emotions, just before describing something that looks a great deal like feeling. Your reader will notice. They are meant to.

What to read next

For another animal learning how to be what it already is, there is Katherine Applegate's Odder. It follows a sea otter pup taught by humans to dive and crack open a clam, and it is written in verse, a few words to a line, which makes it a very different sort of read.