Little Robot, by Ben Hatke

Review copy provided by First Second Books.

This book occupies an interesting space for length/words that really didn’t exist much when I was a kid–or if it did, I didn’t know about it. It’s 132 pages, definitely longer than a “picture book,” but there’s very little text, and even less of what is text is a coherent English word. (Robots do not speak English, apparently. Robots speak robot.) Hatke’s emotionally evocative illustrations get across a great deal of plot without words.

The titular robot and the small girl who finds it have some bumps along their road to making friends–as all of us do when figuring out how it works to be friends with someone quite different from ourselves. There are also external obstacles, some of them scary and some sillier. I expect that Little Robot could bring a smile–and sometimes a grimace of recognition–out of quite a broad range of faces.

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Originally published at Novel Gazing Redux