The Wild Robot Protects by Peter Brown

Rating: Needs Parent Supervision 

Reading Level: Mid-late Elementary, Middle School

Although I didn’t like this third book in the series nearly as much as Book 1, The Wild Robot, or Book 2, The Wild Robot Escapes, (both of which I highly recommend reading first), I still wouldn’t mind letting my kid read this. However, there are a few things parents should know about Book 3:

• Environmental Agenda. There is a clear, strong environmental agenda here. A mining operation is causing deaths to many animals and is devastating the ecology of the ocean and the islands in its wake. Moreover, some streets and even a grocery store are submerged under water due to climate change.
• Conservatives on gender identity may wish to know a short conversation in which the robot, who identifies as a mother, meets a fish whose gender is ambiguous or that switches over as nature prescribes.
• Working Parent away from home long-term. A mother feels tension when her children don’t like her being away from them on a work trip for several months. This might be sensitive for families with a family member who is often away.
• Unrealistic Environmental Cleanup. (SPOILER ALERT!) Unlike in this book, I don’t think we can plan for humans to send robots to just clean up all the pollution for them, as a swarm of robots did in this book. So I think this book actually could be somewhat damaging in that it doesn’t effectively warn against the dangers of pollution. It does, however, at least help illustrate how ecological systems are related.

In the end, I like how the book inspires hope, but I also think some of the resolution is patchy and less realistic.