Simeon Mills

Oh boy, did I love this quirky, creative, unexpected book! In the early 90s, Darryl and his twin brother Kanga have multiple dilemmas: For one, they are robots and must take extraordinary measures to keep their identify secret from the humans who would be happy to destroy them. For another, their robot parents were declared obsolete and have likely been destroyed. So, the boys also have to hide the fact that they are continuing to live in their apartment without adult supervision. Most challenging, they have to survive junior high with all the hilarious and heart-rending dramas of every junior high student, for even robots are capable of crushing on girls, dreaming of becoming adept at basketball, and deciding what it means to be brothers. The Obsoletes, by Simeon Mills. Just came out this year. Track it down; you'll be glad you did.… (más)

2.5 - I think I was just out of my genre zone with this work of sci-fi. It's humorous and not too much of a leap of rationality, but I just didn't have a connection. I will say it kept me reading, so that's a fair positive. The narrator is a kid which I also find challenging in adult novels sometimes. Darryl Livery is also a robot. The year is 1991 and Darryl and his fraternal twin brother Kanga (also a robot) are trying to lay low as they start high school. Not only do they not want to be outed as robots ('toasters' is the epithet) in their robophobic MI small town, but they are also parentless - their Mom and Dad were collected years ago after being determined obsolete. Darryl has filled in the parental role and Kanga, a submissive, simple kid doesn't question his rules which are largely dictated by the manual The Directions which counsels robots on how to best blend in among their truly human brethren. Since robots don't need to eat and don't get sick, the Livery brothers have survived just fine on their own in this lax era of parental involvement or school overreach. However this is all challenged when Kanga makes the frosh basketball team and his skills are truly super-human. Darryl gets dragged in as team manager, second to the original team manager Brooke Moon, a thoroughly weird girl whom he develops a crush on. Now the boys are enmeshed in relationships with other people and life and maintaining their secret starts to get challenging. There are some clever adaptations of human foibles onto robots, such as Darryl's use of a spare parts catalog instead of Playboy, and the imagination required to guess how robots might eat (and later dispose of the undigested food), how they re-charge, how they show affection and how well they hide among humans. You could also extrapolate the story to look at how humans treat "otherness" and the ways we divide ourselves based on superficialities and prejudices, but the book really glides along on the level of preposterous humor and one dimensional characters. The ending has a grand finale feel to it worthy of any thriller but these are kids after all, so a little misplaced, maybe.… (más)