The Lost Robot

A battered humanoid robot wakes up amid a vast, rust-colored wasteland of rubbish and discarded technology in this heavily Toy Story- and WALL-E-inflected picture book by Todd-Stanton (The Comet). To determine how it arrived there, the robot enters an adjacent futuristic city, triggering a series of memories. The white figure recalls once being gifted to a pale-skinned, dark-haired human child—multiple frames show their joyful days together—and even finds the family before realizing that it’s been replaced with a newer model. Heartbroken, the damaged robot resigns itself to the rubbish heap, but two pale-skinned human scavengers—a mother who wears an eye patch and her daughter—rescue it, whisking the protagonist to their decidedly unfuturistic home in an idyllic mountain valley. They lovingly rejuvenate the robot, using a mélange of jubilant hues and helping it to understand that “even the most broken things can always be saved.” Themes of consumerism, obsolescence, and redemption are grounded in genuine emotion throughout this cinematically rendered picture book about finding one’s people and one’s place in the world. Ages 3–5. (Mar.)