The Wild Robot by Peter Brown
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I am not a monster. I am a robot.” A robot packed in a crate is washed up on a deserted island after a storm sinks a ship transporting a cargo of robots somewhere. A gang of curious sea otters investigates and accidentally turns on the robot, birthing her like Venus out of the shell (crate). The island is only deserted in the sense that there are no people on it, for it is teeming with all manner of wildlife: in addition to flowers, trees, and grass, there are foxes, geese, rabbits, bears, beavers, robins, chickadees, geese, opossums, turtles, stick bugs, pikes, squirrels, deer, and more. We are told early on by the narrator, “As you might know, robots don’t really feel emotions. Not like animals do.” This is quickly proven false, as the robot, who calls herself Roz (short for Rozzum unit 7134, Brown’s playful nod to the Rossum’s Universal Robots of Karel Capek’s seminal robot play RUR), evinces curiosity and survival instinct, likes to stay clean, and wants to fit into her new environment. There are moments when she feels happy, as when she manages to escape from a mudslide during a sudden heavy storm. And another time she feels fear because, programmed to survive, she does not want an aggressive bear brother and sister to attack her, so she runs away from them. And yet Roz is not biologically alive. Getting energy directly from sunlight, she doesn’t need to eat. She “sleeps,” but only by shutting down her nonessential functions. Her perfect lines and angles contrast with the irregularity of the island’s flora and fauna. And to the animals on the island, she is at first a “sparkling monster” to be avoided. Interestingly, it never occurs to her that she doesn’t belong there, and instead she feels that she is home. Because of course she was born (turned on) on the island: “I’ve been here my whole life.” The story, then, depicts Roz’ attempts to settle into her new life on the island, learning to camouflage herself to look less artificial and more natural, observing animals communicating with each other so as to learn their universal language, making friends (and enemies), becoming a mother (adopting an orphaned gosling she names Brightbill), building a home, and generally being affected by the community of animals on the island as she affects them, the robot becoming wilder, the animals more civilized. If Roz can say, “I awoke just a machine, but you have taught me how to live, how to be wild,” the animals learn from her how to cooperate, build shelters, and use fire. There are many neat scenes in the novel, like when Roz learns from watching an opossum play dead that she can play alive, or when she “wakes” in the middle of an abnormally cold winter and finds many frozen dead animals and birds (“the wilderness is filled with beauty but also ugliness”), or when Brightbill tells Roz about his adventures migrating south for the winter. The plot is unpredictable. The writing is simple but affecting, being beautiful or moving or funny or suspenseful. The many monochrome illustrations are neat: simple, beautiful, childlike, distinctive, effective. Interestingly, although Roz is gendered female by the text, the pictures show her gender neutral. The novel is a mixed bag about gender. On the one hand, it’s a little disappointing in being rather gender normative. It is true that the mothers in the story are the strongest characters physically and emotionally. And Roz is a highly sympathetic and admirable female protagonist. But it would be interesting if Roz were male and her son Brightbill female. As it is, Roz the female robot becomes a mother, while Brightbill her son becomes flight leader of his flock. There are no gay animals on the island! For that matter, there is no sex, either. In spring new baby animals appear as if by magic, without a word as to their generation. Roz, of course, is a sexless, virgin mother. Sure, it’s a kids’ book! But it has violence and death and droppings. But the lack of any hint of sexual reproduction feels weird. Could there be a way to allude to it so kids wouldn’t get it, but adults or teens would? Anyway, there are plenty of neat messages for kids about things like mortality, global warming, cooperation, and families, as when Brightbill asks Roz, “You’re not my real mother, are you?” and Roz answers, “There are many kinds of mothers,” so Brightbill decides, “We’re a strange family, but I kind of like it that way.” There is also something thoughtful going on in the book regarding the nature of life, artificial things like robots and wild animals like those on the island having more in common than at first meets the eye. Multiple times we are told that Roz or an animal is or is not “designed” to do something or “natural” at doing something. And in “A Note About the Story,” Brown says, “animal instincts are kind of like computer programs.” The novel explores how living creatures (robots or animals) may or may not transcend their programming. About the audiobook version, yikes--the intrusive movie-like music and redundant sound effects (which reproduce textual mentions of splashes, crashes, tearing, button clicking, etc.) during the first 8.5 minutes are difficult to endure, and the excrescent noise almost made me stop listening. Luckily, it stops after several chapters, leaving us with Kate Atwood’s mostly fine reading. Her base narrator and Roz are fine, and some animals like the pike talking underwater are great--though sometimes she tries too hard to “do” different animals, making the beavers, for some reason, stuffy pseudo-brits. When the music and sound effects return with about 18 minutes remaining, they almost ruin the ending. Another irksome thing about the audiobook: every time the narrator addresses us, Kate Atwood says, “listener,” whereas in the original novel the narrator says “reader.” I want to read the original book when listening to an audiobook version, not something adapted for people listening to it. A nice feature of the audiobook is the free pdf file that includes the illustrations from the physical book. I am looking forward to using the physical book in my ESL classes. View all my reviews
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