#InternationalFriendshipDay – Stories of Robot BFFs
In celebration of International Friendship Day, we thought it would be especially fun to showcase some great reads that depict friendships between people like you and ‘bots like Mia. Here are some of our favorites:
Boy meets bot. Bot meets boy. When things got wrong, the boy tries to feed his friend applesauce to make him feel better. The bot brings his friend a spare battery. Even when the tactics are not quite dialed in, the love is unmistakable.
Ezra, a compulsive collector, and Lucy, a compulsive creator, work together to create a robot. But when they put their mother’s old music box as a heart for the robot, their new friend comes alive! The Robot King explores how the power of family and seemingly magical potential of technology might intersect. Bonus: Selznick’s Hugo has a fabulous automaton in it if you can’t get enough of his bots.
A young mouse is bullied at school until he makes a new friend. An awesome, TALL robot friend, brought to us by the irreverent author of the Captain Underpants series.
Based on Disney’s smash hit Big Hero 6, this manga adaption focuses on the story of Hiro and Baymax, a personal care robot created by his older brother. When his brother is gone, how might their bond live anew through Baymax?
When Fillmore and his robot friend Geary build a dog, Sbot doesn’t turn out exactly the way they planned. We love the interplay of similarity and difference in Fillmore’s relationship with his two robot companions. Are the best bots just like us, or does low fidelity have it’s own charm?
It’s never easy to lose someone or something you love. Rafa Was My Robot is a story of love, friendship, and loss, and is a gentle way to show children how to deal with grief.
This important dystopian novel, by the master of the genre better known for The Handmaid Tale, has some adult themes but will appeal to precocious adolescent readers. We’re fascinated by the “psychoengineer” protagonist’s struggle to teach human emotion to a cyborg built to defend the Jewish free town of her birth for corporate pirates.