by Moe Zilla

Created on: April 25, 2010

"I think my teacher is an alien spy," says Benjamin McFadden - and he's got reason to believe it. He lives with his parents in outer space, and on the first page they're blasting off in their silver space ship to attend the Rings of Saturn Preservation Dance. "Grownups only," his father insists, reminding Benjamin he needs to finish the homework for his creative computing class. There's lots of geeky jokes in "Benjamin McFadden and the Robot Babysitter" - and that's just its first page!

Benjamin lives with his cat Fantastic, but it's the robot babysitter who drives him crazy. ("8:00 Earth time," the robot announces. "My programming tells me that it's time for you to sleep.") Benjamin insists to the babysitter that its programming is wrong, and that he's always allowed to stay up until 10:00. "Bed," says the robot babysitter - and then she carries Benjamin away with one of her six tentacle-like arms.

"Maybe I have a cookie?" Benjamin asks.

"No," said Babysitter...

I like how the story creates tension - and that Benjamin solves his problem with computer programming. He insists that the robot's problem is she isn't programmed for fun. And then Benjamin opens the panels on the robots back, "which his parents had told him he should never, never do." Sure enough soon the robot's insisting that 8:20 earth time is the schedule time for fun. And then Benjamin plays badminton with his robot babysitter - on a hovering platform in space!

It's one of several spectacular drawings, as a star-yellow Saturn looms in the background, its brilliant rings spreading across both pages. The tiny space platform is the size of a ping-pong table - if you're out of bounds in this game, it's a long way down! There's a red-and-white striped hose that snakes across the bottom of the picture, showing that they're tethered to Benjamin's space castle in the distance. Timothy Bush drew the book's illustrations and wrote its story. And there's lots of fun details in both!

I like how he draws Benjamin's cat as another curious, golden robot. And he has Benjamin list out to the robots all the things that a boy thinks are fun. There's books, music, tasty foods - and soon Benjamin is exhausted. But the robot says its programming now indicates that it's still time for fun.

And then it leads a robot insurrection, in which every roboticized appliance in the house suddenly rushes off in a quest for human fun!

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