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INTERMEDIATE FICTION
Almond, David

Brand New Boy

320 pp. | Candlewick | May, 2022 | Trade ISBN 978-1-5362-2270-8 $18.99 | Ebook ISBN 978-1-5362-2694-2 $18.99
(2) 4-6 Illustrated by Marta Altés. George, the new kid in Daniel's class, is "weird." Lacking in affect, stiff, and overly literal, he arrives with an aide who takes notes on his every action. When George's ear falls off, revealing a USB port, Daniel and his friends realize, as the reader has probably already guessed (with help from the jaunty cartoonlike illustrations), that he is a robot. By this time, however, the other kids have become fond of him, and when members of the evil corporation that "owns" George come to retrieve him (after what has been a kind of beta test), his classmates rally to save him. At this point the story morphs from a lighthearted romp to something dreamier, in which George spends a single idyllic day in Almond's (Skellig, rev. 5/99; The Color of the Sun, rev. 11/19) favorite territory, a wild place at the edge of a town. He gets grubby, roughhouses with the other kids, learns to tell a joke, and becomes alert to the natural world. The other children face big questions. For example, Daniel contemplates the mind-body problem: "Do you have to be a thing that can pee if you're going to be a thing that can think?" Inevitably, the denouement is bittersweet, leaving us with a simple and sturdy answer to one of the most relevant questions of our time. What defines us as humans? This story's answer is friendship.
Reviewer: Sarah Ellis | Horn Book Magazine Issue: May, 2022

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