Just Do the Right Thing! BB-8 On the RUN (Star Wars) by Drew Daywalt and Matt Myers

It was scary.

The little droid BB-8 has never been sent on a mission of his own, and now separated from his friend Poe, who has always shown him what to do. Poe had told him to run far away, and BB-8 moved as fast as he could, but there was a great explosion back where he'd left Poe.

It is very scary.

Now it is up to him to get the top-secret map to Resistance so they could find Luke Skywalker. The Droid Ship is preparing for launch and he must be there soon! How will he know what to do?

BB-8 remembers one important thing Poe told him:

Buddy,  you do good things and good things will come back to you.

But there are many dangers on the way to making the lift-off. BB falls into a deadfall trap,where he discovers his friend Fez is also a prisoner. His captors cackle that they will sell him part by part, but BB-8 helps his friend Fez to escape, and they race across the desert, pursued by angry Steelpecker birds. BB-8 runs across a starving scavenger family and makes a side trip to get them medical care. Time is short. Will he get to the Ruins and get aboard the Druid Ship before it leaves?

Noted author (for best-sellers The Day the Crayons Quit and The Day the Crayons Came Home et al, (see reviews here) and admitted super Star Wars fan, Drew Daywalt, puts together the hairsbreadth escapes and good deeds along the way in little BB-8's Jukka Desert race to rescue Luke  Skywalker, in Star Wars BB-8 on the Run (Disney Lucasfilm Press, 2017), as artist Mattt Myers provides the dramatic far-away galaxy landscapes as little BB-8 tries to do the right thing and save the galaxy. Primary grade Star Warfans will feel empathy with the little droid all on his own as he does his best to save the rest.

Bloomin' Bot Buddies! Norton and Alpha by Kristyna Litten

Norton was a collector. Battered wheels, rusty cogs, broken springs--they all found their way into Norton's collections.

But best of all were the things Norton didn't have a name for.

Norton is an automaton, a robot himself. So it's no surprise he goes for the techie mechanical stuff, the odder the better.

And one day he finds some that sparks his interest, something round with a coil of wire protruding at one end. He takes it back to his workshop and makes something different out of it. He calls his four-legged project Alpha.

Alpha becomes his constant companion, and Norton trains him to help search out more treasures in the trash--hula hoops, a wrench, a pipe--gems for a tinkerer robot.

But one day Norton and Alpha find something quite weird.

It's something red, sticking up out of the ground.

Norton didn't have a name for it, either.

It was unlike anything else they had ever seen before

With a bit of effort they plucked it from the ground... and set out on their way home.

But all of Norton's experiments fail to show what the strange red thing is. At last, stumped, Norton gives up and tosses it out of the window.

Bad weather follows, so Norton and Alpha stay in, catching up on chores around the workshop, But at last, a nice day comes, and they feel up for a treasure-collecting hunt. Norton oils all their moving parts, and the two venture outside.

And they see something else they have never seen before--colorful flowers everywhere, orange, pink, blue--just like the red thing Norton had thrown out! They were beautiful, Norton decided...

"... and that's all that really mattered."

In Kristyna Litten's new Norton and Alpha (Sterling, 2017), the author's two robots seem unlikely lovers of nature, but artist Litton changes their minds in a dazzling display of blooms which fill a four-page gatefold illustration that wins them over and entices them to pick enough to decorate their spartan quarters back home. Norton is a different sort of robot, but as Kirkus Reviews suggests, "[This is] "a quietly amusing fable that highlights the importance of nature in a mechanical world."