Boot: Small Robot big Adventure by Shane Hegarty illustrated by Ben Mantle

Oddly I am really drawn to books about robots. And again, quite oddly, I usually find they are often very emotional stories. I can hear you saying, hold on, robots don't have emotions.  Yes they do in this book called Boot.

"Humans made robots so that we'd be smart enough to understand them without making us smarter than them. So we could be helpful to them without questioning them. But something made us ... change. Maybe that thing was when they threw us out. When we found ourselves lost and broken and rejected. We started to ask questions. Started to ... feel things."

Boot has been discarded and when he "wakes up" he only has two and a half memories. A girl called Beth appears in these little fragments of his past life. Boot knows time has passed for each memory because Beth is wearing a butterfly pendant with 16 "tiny green, red, yellow and blue jewels dazzling in its wings." In the second memory one jewel is missing from its wing and in the third, even shorter memory of just 5.824 seconds, there are only thirteen jewels left.

When Boot "wakes up" he says one word - boot. He is certain Boot must be his name. He knows the girl called Beth loved him. His life is in danger. He is about to be smashed to pieces in a place called 'Krush 'em Kwik' by a maniac called Flint. Boot cannot let this happen. He has discovered the butterfly necklace is in a drawer in his side. He must find Beth. He is certain she needs him.

This book is fabulous. I read it in one sitting. Boot is a hero but so are his friends. He meets an old model robot called Noke who is desperate for a plug so he can recharge his batteries, a crazy mixed up dog robot called Poochy, a camera robot called Tag who takes the photos of scared people on the ghost train at the funfair and a robot called Red.

"Red was shaped more like a human than any other robot I had yet encountered. It had long limbs and a smooth body so light red it was almost see-through."

Red has a very serious problem. She has a design fault which means she will burst into flames if she gets too hot. To stay cool Red chants calm coool words as she goes around and around on a carousel in the breeze.

Boot has only his fragments of memory to use as a guide but with his team of unlikely friends they set off to look for Beth. What they don't know is that they are being followed by Flint. He and his henchmen, called Cutters, plan to destroy Boot. Flint hates all robots because he knows one day they will take over his job.

My copy of Boot was an advanced reader edition from Beachside Bookshop and so it did not have the illustrations and I am not allowed to quote from the text. This book will be available in May, 2019. I plan to grab the real book and check it so I can come back to this page and add in some text quotes and see the illustrations which I know are scattered throughout the text. My copy just said 'illustration to come.'

There are some very funny but also some beautifully insightful parts to this text. You can read a text extract here. Reviewers will link this book with Toy Story and WALL-E and while I do agree I think this book is so much more.  There will be a sequel to Boot published in 2020.

I would pair this book with Ollie's Odyssey by William Joyce.  For older students I would suggest Eager and sequels by Helen Fox should be their next read along with the wonderful Wild Robot  and sequels by Peter Brown.