Appealing speculative fiction with memorable robot personalities.
A trio of robot workers sets out to help a girl they believe to be the last of humankind.
Thirty years after robots put an end to humanity in order to save the planet, a girl appears at the narrator’s worksite. XR_935 is purpose-built to install solar panels in a large array. XR_935’s work companion, enormous, strong Ceeron, built to lift and carry, is a scholar of human jokes and colloquialisms. Smaller, zippy SkD connects wires and communicates via emoji pictographs. XR_935 itself is analytical, constantly running numbers, data, and measurements. Emma, a white-presenting human, explains that her family and others have been overcome by a flu epidemic in their hidden bunker. The lone survivor, she hopes to reach a point of help marked on a map. XR_935 grapples with the dilemma: It needs to violate the rules it knows in order to provide forbidden assistance to this Unknown LifeForm. Bacon deftly constructs an amiable but also moral and emotional self for XR_935 out of the data that the unlikely hero collects and considers. The result is an amusing and upbeat adventure, with glimpses of a fading human footprint on the planet and a suggestion that there’s hope for a shared AI and human future. An off note is sounded, however, in XR_935’s initial conjecture that Emma could be “a shaved gorilla” (to which Emma reacts, “not cool”), which unnecessarily deploys a phrase that some young readers will recognize as a racist one. After all, via data clips, XR_935 and its fellow robots have seen images of humans multiple times.
Appealing speculative fiction with memorable robot personalities. (Science fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3691-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride.
Zipping back and forth in time atop outsized robo–bell bottoms, mad inventor Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) legs his way to center stage in this slightly less-labored continuation of episode 9.
The action commences after a rambling recap and a warning not to laugh or smile on pain of being forced to read Sarah Plain and Tall. Pilkey first sends his peevish protagonist back a short while to save the Earth (destroyed in the previous episode), then on to various prehistoric eras in pursuit of George, Harold and the Captain. It’s all pretty much an excuse for many butt jokes, dashes of off-color humor (“Tippy pressed the button on his Freezy-Beam 4000, causing it to rise from the depths of his Robo-Pants”), a lengthy wordless comic and two tussles in “Flip-o-rama.” Still, the chase kicks off an ice age, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Big Bang (here the Big “Ka-Bloosh!”). It ends with a harrowing glimpse of what George and Harold would become if they decided to go straight. The author also chucks in a poopy-doo-doo song with musical notation (credited to Albert P. Einstein) and plenty of ink-and-wash cartoon illustrations to crank up the ongoing frenzy.
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
