No-Bot: The Robot with No Bottom

Bernard the robot leaves his bottom behind on a swing in the park (easily done, I suppose), and sadly declares himself the No-bot of the title. It’s a word play to raise a chuckle and Bernard is a likeable red robot who spends the book forlornly searching for his lost bottom. For a time, it’s utilised by his friends bird and bear as a nest (too heavy) and as drums (too tinny). There are false alarms when Bernard thinks he’s spotted it as a hat, a bike basket, a window box and a boat. Eventually, he is reunited with it after finding it being used to make sand castles on the beach. Back on the swing, in the final pages, he makes sure he doesn’t leave it behind, but children will notice that he hasn’t paid the same attention to his arm. Not much of a tale, but Sue Hendra has told it with care. Bernard and his friends are colourful and appealing characters and Sue Hendra makes clever use of robot associated design elements. Some of the illustrations are on graph paper and the endpapers feature the books characters incorporated into circuit diagrams. As far as young children go, a mention of bottoms in a story seldom goes amiss.