5. Pick Me! Pick Me!

Clink

Written by Kelly DiPucchio

Illustrated by Matthew Myers

Balzer & Bray, 2011

$16.99, ages 4-7, 32 pages.

A run-down robot named Clink dreams of belonging to a child, but none of the children who come to the toy shop seem to want a toy like him.

He's got loose springs, and his selling points seem to be duds. All he can do is play music and pop out burned toast from the toaster that's his noggin.

Children nowadays want robots with zing -- which is what every other robot in the shop seems to have.

Clink's robot friend Zippy has retractable arms that twirl out and grab things, and Penny, wow.

She can bake cookies with one arm and do math homework with the other. What child wouldn't want that?

Poor Clink, all he does is "Plink! Plop!" and fizzle.

Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World)

By Mac Barnett,

Illustrated by Dan Santat

Disney-Hyperion, 2010

$16.99, ages 4-8, 40 pages

The cover of this amusing picture book grabs you like a cult B movie and gets you feeling suspense before you even know why.

There you see a girl in black pigtails gaping at a gigantic robot and frog (which you see reflected in her glasses) as helicopters close in from behind.

Across the front of her jumper the title of the book yells, "Oh No!" in bold capital letters outlined in red.

Did the girl utter those words or was she too tongue-tied to get them out?

Barnett and Santat take a dramatic story idea, treat it like a sci-fi action flick, and in the process, make us feel as though we're watching it play out on a film screen.

In the story, a girl builds a 360-foot robot for her Fifth Grade science fair project, only to see the experiment go terribly wrong as the robot starts to plow down her city, much like the archetypal King Kong.

Santat zooms in on top of the action and scenes sprawl over the fold. Each illustration is letterboxed to appear as if it was formatted for the book from a wide-screen movie, with black bars appearing above and below the pictures.