"I do not eat anything, including parents."

This story was a little more middlegrade than I expected, having gone into it with no knowledge beyond the fact that it had "robot" in the title and therefore fit into my yearly Scifi Summer Reading Challenge. With no prior knowledge or theories, I was pleasantly surprised by how cozy and generally wholesome this story was. It's the kind of story I would love to write someday and brought back all the childhood magic of the Redwall series and other similar franchises I adore growing up.

When a shipment of robots gets lost at sea and battered by the ocean before landing on the shores of a deserted island, all the robots are destroyed except one. A group of curious otters accidentally awaken the surviving robot, Roz. We follow Roz as she learns how to be a wild robot, how to survive on the island, and how to speak to the numerous animal inhabitants so that she can befriend them. When an accident kills an entire family of geese, leaving only one egg intact, Roz's determination to protect the gosling inside of it sets our story into motion. But this story is about more than friendship and survival, because the creators of the robots are searching for their missing merchandise and will stop at nothing to get it all back ... dead or alive.

I wish this series had been around when I was a kid. As it is, it really inspired me to delve a little more deeply into my writing for younger audiences and jump back into my current work in progress, even though it is not at all the same. The gentle whimsy of the majority of this story, the short chapters, the tender tales and lovely little relationships we see grow across this delightful little tale left a warm place in my heart and I am really looking forward to picking up book two.