Summary: A new robot is lost, and as attempts to survive, it learns from the animals around it and becomes a “wild robot.”
My son read and enjoyed The Wild Robot last year when he was eight. He is a pretty good reader and likes to read books on his own. I have been interested in reading the book myself since I saw that it was being made into a movie.
This is a classic late elementary book. There are tons of very short chapters, rarely more than a couple of pages each. This makes the book both easy to engage for 3-5th graders to read by themselves and easy to read to them at that age or slightly younger.
I appreciate that this is a book that admits hard things. This book is mostly about a robot trying to understand the world around “her” and about animals. The reality of the wild world is that animals will die. Some will be eaten by others, some will die from elements or accidents. The fact that there is grief and sorrow in that loss is not glossed over.
The Wild Robot is a self-contained book. I am nearly done with the second book, The Wild Robot Escapes. That book builds on the first but is a complete story as well. I will read the third soon.
I have avoided reading any reviews of the movie at this point, so I am not sure if the movie is just the first book or if it is the whole trilogy. But I am going to finish the whole trilogy before I watch it to be sure.
There is a nice gentleness to the books. Most of the plot conflict is based on misunderstanding. I think this is a good model of plot development for this age. Children are seeking to understand. That doesn’t mean that I am opposed to “good/evil” stories, but stories rooted in misunderstanding I think help grow empathy and seek to give alternative perspectives which should be part of a children’s book diet.
Based on what I have read so far, I really do think this is an excellent addition to the middle elementary literature.
I read this on Kindle because I saw it on sale, but I think it likely would be a good audiobook as well. I listened to the 5 minute preview and that short excerpt was pretty good.
The Wild Robot by Peter Brown Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition, Audible.com Audiobook