Rabbit & Robot

1. Bibliography
Smith, A. 2018. Rabbit & Robot. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781534422216

2. Summary
Rabbit & Robot follow two separate stories until the two stories collide as one. The first story follows Billy Hinman, Cager Messer’s bisexsual friend, and Rowan Tuttle-Finewater, Cager’s cog (robot) caretaker. They manipulate Cager onto a transpod into space to board the Tennessee ship owned by Cager’s parents, in order to free Cager from woz, a drug that Cager is addicted to. The second story follows Meg, Hatfield, and Jeffrie Cutler, as they board the transpod as robots. Finally, while on the ship, Cager and Meg’s paths cross, and both stories become one; the teenagers then deal with the “craziness” that happens on the ship. A new ship arrives, carrying a family of blue water-life like forms, and one of which who created "the worm" that caused the cannibalism in the Tennessee, Livingston. Cager, Billy and Rowan are left with Meg and Jeffrie and the cannibal cogs, until Meg is able to get to the control room and fix the code to change hers and Meg’s identity to humans, saving them from being eaten by the cogs as robots. With this code change, she is also able to stop the cannibalism. Finally, as things are coming to an end, Meg, Jeffrie and Rowan decide to go back to Earth on a lifeboat, and Meg tries to convince Cager to join them. It isn’t until Cager reads Meg’s love note to him that he decides to take the chance on hope with them. In the end, Meg, Jeffrie, Cager, Billy, Rowan, and a few other cogs travel together back to Earth.

3. Discussion
To be completely honest, I did not enjoy this book--at all. It was extremely hard for me to read, or even want to continue to read it, and it was even harder for me to keep up with the storyline. I found myself having to constantly stop and ask myself “what is even going on right now?”. I have always enjoyed reading science fiction books, so I was looking forward to reading Rabbit & Robot, but I was not even five chapters in when I was already stopping either by being grossed out (from descriptions of a giraffe eating a lion) or being confused by the science fiction in the novel.

After watching the video in the chapter of Fantasy and Science Fiction in our textbook, I would say Rabbit & Robot falls under the section of “Robots/Androids/Cyborgs and Artificial Intelligence”. Even though the main characters, Cager, Billy, Meg and Jeffrie are humans from Earth, the majority of the book revolves around cogs (robots), and the setting is mainly in space.

Even though this story discusses a made up drug named woz, it does discuss drugs and addiction. Along with this, the language and sexual interactions that are told throughout the story would not make this book acceptable to elementary and middle school readers. In my opinion, I would only recommend this book to students in the high school level, and even then, I could see this book causing controversy if it is found in a school library.

4. Connections
I am not sure if I would feel comfortable having this book in my school library because the topics of sex, drugs and the descriptions of cogs eating other cogs was too gruesome for me to handle that I would feel uncormfortable recommending it to readers. Other books that I have read may have had these topics from the story, but I could find certain chapters with similar topics that could be discussed in a classroom setting. With Rabbit & Robot however, I am unsure how this book could be used in a classroom setting at all, as I would not recommend it to any reader or teacher to use as a class read.

I have not read anything else from Andrew Smith, and after reading Rabbit & Robot, I am not sure if I would want to, though I have heard good things about Grasshopper Jungle.