By Ame Dyckman
A boy and a robot meet in the woods, become friends, and then each one decides the other is broken and tries to fix them.
A boy is out collecting pinecones. A robot rolls by. They play all afternoon, and it's lovely, until the robot's power switch gets bumped off. The boy is sure his friend is sick, so he does what you'd do for a sick friend: tucks him into bed, feeds him applesauce, reads him a story. Then the switch gets bumped back on, and now the boy is asleep, and the robot is sure HIS friend is broken. So the robot does what a robot would do. Oil. A fresh battery. It takes a grown-up to sort them both out.
This is the robot book for the age before the obsession has anywhere to go yet. Your child already knows what a robot is and already loves them, and this hands them a robot who is warm and funny without ever stopping being a machine. The structure is the whole gift: the same story runs twice, once each way, and a four-year-old catches that pattern about halfway through the second half and feels enormously clever. Dan Yaccarino's art is thick lines and flat bright color, the kind a young child can read across the room. It is a friendship story with a robot in it, which is exactly what a young robot-lover is actually asking for.