BROBOT BEDTIME

Three little robot brothers are headed for a breakdown at the end of the day if they can’t go to sleep.

Written entirely in dialogue printed in color-coded speech balloons shaped to correspond with the shapes of the speakers’ heads, Bardhan-Quallen’s text opens with a mother robot sending her three robot children (the eponymous brobots) to bed. Wordplay abounds. The littlest one, Beep, can’t go to sleep because he has “the flick-ups,” and big brothers Buzz and Crash try to help him. Their mother isn’t pleased that she hears “gears turning up there” well past bedtime and asks from outside their closed door if they “need a hard reboot.” Together, the brothers go through a checklist of steps to ready themselves and their room for sleep. The punch line arrives at book’s end when Beep finally drifts off and snores so loudly that Crash and Buzz cannot sleep. Throughout, Campbell’s illustrations depict the brobots in their room. Although their figures are more saturated than the watercolor-wash backgrounds, the translucent medium seems somehow at odds with the mechanized robotic characters, and it’s sometimes difficult to read the pictures and gauge emotions. Still, the mechanized protagonists will probably keep little ones engaged enough to sort out the potentially confusing images.

Will robot fans enjoy this bedtime book? Affirmative.