By Peter Brown
A robot washes up on a wild island and has to learn, the hard way, how to become part of it.
A cargo ship goes down in a storm, and one crate washes ashore on a rocky island full of wild animals. Inside is Roz, a robot who switches on with no idea where she is or what she's for. The animals are terrified of her, the weather wants to kill her, and then she accidentally ends up the mother of an orphaned gosling — so Roz has to do the one thing she was never built to do: figure out how to belong.
It's science, not sorcery — Roz is a machine, everything she does has a reason, and the wonder comes from watching a made thing slowly grow a heart. And it's built for a child who thinks they don't like thick books: the chapters are tiny, Peter Brown's black-and-white pictures are on nearly every spread, and it flies by. Under the fast, easy surface it's asking a big question about what makes someone a real person, so a reluctant reader gets a genuine story and never notices the pages going by.