The Wild Robot Escapes

Summary: Roz becomes a farm robot and wants to find her son and make her way home to the island.

At the end of the first book of the series, The Wild Robot, Roz had been damaged trying to protect her adopted son (a wild goose) and her friends (the other animals on the island where she lives) from the robots that had been sent to retrieve her. Those robots were Those robots were all destroyed, but Roz had no choice but to turn herself in so that she could be repaired.

Roz was refurbished but she maintained her memories and personality. After refurbishment, she was sold to a disabled farmer. As Roz works the farm, she becomes friends with the farm animals and the two children on the farm.

She is good at farming. She understands how to work with the animals and the other farm machines. She can see that there is real value in the work, not just because the work is enjoyable, but because the work she does serves the family and Roz likes the family.

It is not a surprise, based on the name of the book, but she grapples with whether she should escape (the farm does run better with her), but she misses her son. It is a spoiler to say she does decide to escape, but that seemed clear from the beginning, and from the title and about half of the book is the story of her escape and trying to find her way back to the island.

I wrote a long post about the importance of depth to a story. Children's books and young adult books are improved by writing depth into the story. Yes kids will only get the surface the first time they read them. But kids generally like to revisit stories. And I do think these are short enough books and simple enough reading level that many kids will revisit them. I don't think there is as much depth to this story as KB Hoyle's writing, but there are good philosophical questions embedded in the story. Ideas of vocation and family and what we were meant to become are natural questions for a learning robot.

There is a twist toward the end of the book that I look forward to understanding more about when I read the third book. My son read the first book on his own last year when he was in third grade. He enjoyed the Wild Robot but did not keep reading the series. I picked these first two up on sale because of the movie, but I do think they are worth reading. I tend to like young adult books more than middle grade books because I like more complex stories. But this series has had good characters and an engaging enough story that I have read them on my own without kids and enjoyed them.

This was originally posted on my blog at https://bookwi.se/the-wild-robot-escapes/