This book caught my attention at the Random House Canada Blogger Preview because it was marketed as “like if Up and Wall-E had a baby.” I love Up, and while I never watched Wall-E, the premise of the book sounded too intriguing to miss: 34 year old Ben Chambers discovers a robot in his garden and embarks on a journey around the world to find out where it came from and return it home.

A Robot in the Garden is an endearing, feel good story. Ben’s quest to find the robot’s home adds a sense of purpose to his generally aimless life, and teaches him about love. The robot Tang is indeed written to be loveable — a child-like total innocent who latches on to Ben and comes to rely on him for everything. I personally found Tang annoying after a while — his helplessness at times struck me as neediness and his wonder at the simplest things was at times cloying. So I wasn’t completely in love with Tang, as I expected I was meant to be, but to be fair, his behaviour is fairly realistic given the world the author built.

To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed that the story took place in a world where robots were everywhere, and that the problem with Tang is that he’s practically obsolete as a model. I suppose when I heard the promo pitch at the Blogger Preview, I’d imagined a world like ours now, and Tang as a rickety, patched up robot that was truly alone in the world because humanoid robots haven’t hit the mainstream yet. (I was about to say that they haven’t been invented yet, but then I remembered this pretty awesome sounding hotel in Japan.) Tang being an obsolete model in a world full of robots makes the story feel a bit more predictable, and the themes raised feel more standard.

That being said, Install’s story is as charming as you’d expect it to be. There’s a hilarious chapter about an android hotel, and a nice subplot about two secondary characters finding love. My favourite part was a scene near the end where Ben goes to a family affair and runs into his ex wife, and it is she who most clearly notices the change that Tang has brought about in him. I love that, because it encapsulates what the whole journey to find Tang’s home has been about: a man finding the humanity in a robot, and a robot helping bring out the humanity in a man.

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Thank you to Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.