Bot Camp by Paul Clarke
The Bot Books #1
Publisher: Green Hill Publishing
Genre: Middle Grade (8 – 12 y.o.), Action/Adventure, Contemporary
Rating: 3 Stars
Reviewed by Astilbe

Twelve-year-old Daniel is obsessed with combat robotics — because duh, who isn’t? So when his plucky lifter-bot snags him a spot at Bernard Barker’s legendary Bot Camp, Daniel short-circuits with excitement. Meeting his tech-innovator hero will be a dream come true!

His mom says he should try to make friends, but Daniel won’t have time for that. Bot Camp is a high-voltage competition and only one kid will win the ultimate prize: becoming Bernard’s apprentice.

Unfortunately, from the moment Daniel steps into the fully automated, AI-powered training complex, nothing goes to plan. The other participants are brilliant, but Daniel’s teammates are totally useless. He’ll never impress Bernard at this rate.

So while the others relax for the night, Daniel convinces his team to sneak into the workshop to fix their bot. But when the labyrinth-like facility mysteriously goes into lockdown, Daniel finds himself in real danger and only his teammates can help.

Summer camp is a rite of passage for many kids and, in this case, maybe a few robots as well.

The plot was fast-paced and exciting. There was never a time when it felt easy to set this down and stop reading for a while because every chapter was filled with adventure and twelve-year-olds aren’t always known for thinking about the consequences of their actions ahead of time. This is something I’d especially recommend to reluctant readers or kids who need a lot of action in their stories.

I would have liked to see more character development. Despite spending over two hundred pages with the characters, particularly Daniel, I’d struggle to describe his or their personalities or interests other than their love of combat robotics. Yes, this was a plot-centered book, so I wasn’t expecting pages of development for every single character or anything, but that was something that felt missing from the storyline.

Combat robotics was a topic I knew little about when I began reading chapter one, so I appreciated the detailed descriptions of how these battles work and what sorts of techniques players use to create robots that are good at both defending themselves and causing damage to their competitors. While I’ll leave it up to other readers who know more about this type of competition to share their thoughts on how well it represented what actually occurs in those battles, I certainly thought this made it sound exciting and educational.

Bot Camp kept me on my toes from the first paragraph to the last on.