Hot Bot: The Robot Book by Heather Brown

A ROBOT IS MADE OF SO MANY PARTS...

And in creator Heather Brown's clever design, it seems all of them are moving parts. In a sturdy and appealingly colored board book format, Brown's new Robot Book,The (Accord, 2010) gives youngsters a chance to see how all those mechanical parts go together to make the friendly robot on the cover.

Many gears, slides, and rotating body parts give little fingers intriguing things to do on each page, and a big bonus of this book is the incidental lessons in mechanics--how gears engage to move each other and how levers work to move things up and down--which kids will absorb as they engage with each page. All moving parts are carefully constructed and almost indestructible in regular use.

Against a shiny black background, the lively muted pastels of the robot stand out in a near 3-D effect, revealing a jolly robot whose facial features , formed entirely of gears, manage to look altogether friendly. One arms rotates in a 365 degree circle, and this metal man even has a heart geared up for lots of giving.

For visual and tactile appeal, Robot Book,The, an inventively-designed "movable" book for the youngest bibliophile, has a lot going for it. As Publishers Weekly puts it, "It's an elegantly simple design with care paid to every detail."