This is such an odd, original, thought-provoking and heartwarming tale. The book is a meditation on what it is to be human and, at the same time, an incredibly fun adventure. Readers will lose their heart to Roz and it’s a truly gripping read. The illustrations are also enigmatic and beautiful. He loved the book, and wanted me to ask what your plans were for “The Wild Robot 2”, since Roz’s story is clearly ongoing. I really like your Wild Robot books. I was hoping for a fourth book. I would name it the Wild Robot Finds Its Home. When the movie comes out, if you make one,

Roz figures out how to survive. She's observant and studies animal behavior. She's kind and adopts and raises an orphaned gosling. Though the animals on the island are originally afraid of her and consider her a monster, she wins them over by helping them and being kind. Roz takes action to help the animals survive a brutal winter.Evie adores Roz. She plays Roz, she IS Roz, and when she is, being kind all the time, being helpful, sitting still and being quiet is easy.

It took eight years, but I finally found an answer to the question that led me down this path. What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? She’d make the wilderness her home. In 2012, after years of studying and thinking, I returned to the question that started this whole process: What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? To answer that question, I invented a robot character named Rozzum (a subtle nod to Čapek’s play), and tried to imagine how she’d handle life in the wilderness. The Wild Robot & The Wild Robot Escapes are my 2 favorite books ever. I recommend them to everyone (every student and family that I encounter.) When the book first came out, I read it to my 3rd grade class & they loved it. At the end they said they were both happy and sad. They were happy to know how it ended, but sad that it was finished. They didn’t want to say good-bye to the characters they had grown to love. They wanted to know 2 things: Would there be a book 2, and would there be a movie? Roz may not feel emotions, but young readers certainly will as this tender, captivating tale unfolds."-- The Washington Post

I was really intrigued by the image of a robot in a tree, and a question suddenly popped into my mind: What would an intelligent robot do in the wilderness? I had mixed feelings when the ARCs arrived. It was exciting to see The Wild Robot in physical form, but I knew the finished book would be very different. Oh well. My publisher sent out the ARCs and responses started rolling in. The Wild Robot received its first official review in November 2015, two months before I finished working on it. Miraculously, it was a starred review. I read this book over the summer, and knew I absolutely had to share it with my Grade 4 class. They were absolutely enthralled! Thank you for writing a book for middle schoolers that seems to recognize that they are intelligent, capable thinkers. We had so many fabulous discussions and are hoping for a sequel. Evie is four, and she has been a robot named Roz for almost two months now. That’s a long time when you are four.

With my writing rules and my story maps and my research and my notes and my sketches in tow, I drove out to a cabin in the woods, brewed a pot of coffee, and opened my laptop. There was nothing left to do but write. Dave dropped final illustrations into the book file, and the file was eventually sent to the printer Robots can take almost any shape and so I considered different designs and capabilities and purposes for Roz. She had to be strong and intelligent, but not too strong and not too intelligent. If readers were ever going to relate to a robot she would have to be vulnerable, not invincible. And it might help if she were humanoid—that is, if she had arms and legs and a head—so readers could imagine themselves in her shoes. Most important, she had to be able to learn. Roz stumbled on until she found a patch of ground that was flat and open and carpeted with pine needles. It seemed like a safe place, and safety was all the robot really wanted, so she stood there, motionless, all perfect lines and angles set against the irregular shapes of the wilderness.I used a program called Scrivener to write the story. It’s great for organizing notes and research and chapters. For this to truly be a “robot nature story” Roz would need to encounter a wide variety of natural elements. And the story would have to take place in the future to explain the existence of intelligent robots. I imagined how the wilderness might look in a few hundred years, and two things occurred to me: 1) because of climate change and rising sea levels, animals from far and wide might eventually be forced together as they all seek higher ground, and 2) some of that higher ground might become completely surrounded by water, forming new islands. With that in mind, I set the story far in the future, on a rugged northern island that was formed by rising seas, and that had a diverse array of weather and flora and fauna. I spent over a year cobbling together my first draft of The Wild Robot. It was rough. Very rough. But Little, Brown & Company liked it enough to sign it up and in July of 2014 it became official: my robot nature story would be published! There was just one problem…I didn’t know how to finish it. But I kept going. I simplified everything. The plot, the characters, the writing all became simpler, and they gradually started fitting together like puzzle pieces. The story grew more metaphorical and philosophical. The Wild Robot was feeling less like science fiction and more like a fable.