The Winter of the Robots

September 1, 2013
What if the robot apocalypse was beginning-- subtly--in your own neighborhood? Blue flashes and sinister clanking noises emanating from the junk abandoned near the otter habitat that Jim and his science-fair partner Rocky (short for Rochelle) plan to observe via remote camera turn out to be the remains of a defense research project. The fierce, Taser-armed, self-reprogramming dinobots don't make more than a fleeting appearance until the penultimate, climactic chapter, but since Jim and his friends take up robot construction and programming when the ottercams are stolen, it becomes clear early on that their skills will be put to use in ways larger than a local robot-fighting competition. The burnt-out buildings of the research company highlight the North Minneapolis setting of an urban neighborhood struggling with contemporary economic hardship. Scaletta provides his seventh-grade protagonists with complex back stories and gives them a fair amount of freedom to roam, sophisticated understanding of the adult world and plenty of smarts for learning how to code instructions for semi-autonomous robots. These young teens' own autonomy is a given--parents and adults close to them remain clueless. By the time Jim and his friends confront the robot menace with their own impressively armored fighting creation, they have mastered a fair amount of coding and hardware technology in robotics. A deft mix of middle school drama and edgy techno thrills. (Science fiction. 11-14)

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Starred review from December 1, 2013
Grades 6-9 *Starred Review* The probability of his temperamental dad finding out that Jim has borrowed several high-tech security cameras for a science fair project turns out to be the least of his worries in this offbeat thriller. Set up in a seedy North Minneapolis junkyard near the river in hopes of observing otters, the cameras immediately disappear after a flash of weird footage. Should Jim and his seventh-grade friends believe the claim of Ted, a decrepit local? He says the yard, the site of an experimental robot lab that was destroyed years ago in a huge explosion, is haunted. Told in a spare, matter-of-fact narrative, this packs the space between the lines with humor, drama, romantic tension, and deftly delivered insight into the characters of a diverse, well-developed cast. The tale pitches Jim and his classmates (with significant help from his smarter little sister, Penny) into designing, constructing, and testing homemade battle robots both as plan B for the science fair and as a later entry in a competition at a nearby mall. The latter hard-fought contest presages a similar but much larger scale climactic bashfest in the wake of revelations that the junkyard is indeed inhabitedby feral, self-programming robots capable of violence and murder. Scaletta amps up the voltage with suspense and excitement, but he also seamlessly integrates family issues and peer dynamics and cybernetic feats that seem only slightly futuristic.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)