Book Review - The Wild Robot Escapes

The Wild Robot Escapes - Peter Brown

The Good
Roz the robot is ultimately a kind and considerate creature.   The majority of the humans she encounters seem to fall into this category as well.  The children mention God when praying before supper.  Roz insists on a non-violent approach to all conflict.   It was wonderful to have the farmers named 'Shareef' and illustrated to look like middle eastern people of colour, because you almost never see that.  The story ends happily.


The Bad
The children,  Jad and Jaya, have lost their mother to a farm accident that also crippled their father.  The farm is destroyed by a tornado and Jad almost loses his life.  A wolf pack hunts Roz for revenge.  Mr. Shareef is occasionally brusque with Roz.  A cow mentions a previous farm she lived on as a horrible place she was glad to escape.  Animals die 'offscreen' and some pigeons helping Roz escape fall from the sky.  There is a lot of tension at the end of the book when we are led to believe that Roz is completely destroyed.


My Thoughts
I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a group read aloud as much as this two-book series.  What's fascinating to me is how the author managed to introduce such adult topics into a child's book while never making the story depressing or suggesting that one side was right and the other wrong.  For example,  in this book Roz notices that the Shareefs are eating a chicken.  She matter-of-factly asks herself if the chicken led a happy life, if it knew it would be eaten,  and if this was 'fair'.  Now, this sort of query in a lesser story would pretty much be guaranteed to devolve into a pat vegan answer, or some sort of treatise on animal rights, but Roz is neither afraid to think about these topics, nor is she afraid to conclude that humans are 'following their instincts ' when eating other animals.  Likewise, it would be easy to make sure that Roz made no emotional connections on the farm to ensure an easy plot transition to the escape, but the author insists on making it 'realistic ' and allows his characters to have a difficult time leaving, to be torn.  When the return to the island happens, some of the animals have died in the absence,  because that would be reality on a wild island.  I just really appreciated this attention to detail.   I also loved the intense parallel to a slave escape narrative!  Roz and the other robots are property, she escapes by running under cover of darkness and trying to avoid habitation,  she travels north to freedom,  even the train scene, where robots were segregated from humans -it was all incredibly thought provoking.   In short, this was amazing.  Amazing.

Here is my review of the first book, The Wild Robot!