Robot Rumpus

When busy parents buy a group of robots to help their child get ready for bed, the results are not what they expected.

PreS-Gr 3–When a little girl's busy parents enlist a series of robots to put her to bed, chaos ensues. Things are going fine for a while: dinner is delicious, the kitchen cleanup goes well, and bath time begins without a hitch. But when Wash-bot spots a dangerous animal in the water–the little girl's toy crocodile–it goes into emergency mode. Wash-bot slips into Dress-bot, who crashes into Teeth-bot, and Clean-bot becomes so overwhelmed that it starts to dress Dry-bot in the little girl's pajamas. Even Book-bot starts smoking before it can read the little girl her bedtime story. Amid the commotion, the child steals away and puts herself to bed. All is quiet until her parents come home and find their house in a state of disaster, the robots running amok. The book is framed by sequential images inside the front and back covers that mimic a robot catalog, with taglines describing each bot's specialty. The back cover has the same spread, but each bot's advertisement now has a red “Withdrawn for Technical Reasons” across it. This funny and high-energy tale is illustrated with pen-and-ink and bold watercolors.–Jennifer Miskec, Longwood University, Farmville, VAα(c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.