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
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
