TJ Klune has been a source of lovely new fantasy novels that combine profound themes with sfnal elements and usually contain an LGBTQIA+ romance. He's also known to tug at the heartstrings, so of course I wasn't going to miss this book. I got the audio version from my library and I quite enjoyed the narrator's performance of the (especially non-human) characters. This still doesn't reach the heights of Cerulean Sea, but it was kind of cute, kind of fun, and kind of a Pinocchio retelling.
IN THE LIVES OF PUPPETS
by TJ Klune
Published: Tor, 2023
Hardcover: 432 pages
Audiobook: 15 hours, 22 minutes
Narrated by: Daniel Henning
Standalone
My rating: 6.5/10
Opening line: A tiny vacuum robot screamed as it spun in concentric circles, spindly arms that ended in pincers waving wildly in the air.
In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots—fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They're a family, hidden and safe.
The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled "HAP," he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio–a past spent hunting humans.
When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio's former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic's assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming.
Along the way to save Gio, amid conflicted feelings of betrayal and affection for Hap, Vic must decide for himself: Can he accept love with strings attached?
Inspired by Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, and like Swiss Family Robinson meets Wall-E, In the Lives of Puppets is a masterful stand-alone fantasy adventure from the beloved author who brought you The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door.
I am a sucker for found families and TJ Klune does not disapoint. In this book, we follow Vic, a young human man, and his family who live in tree houses in the forest, far from civilization and other humans or robots. Vic's family is comprised of his non-human father, a vacuum robot named Rambo, and a nursing robot with the absolutely perfect name of Nurse Ratched (it's an acronym, but that doesn't really matter, does it). While Rambo likes to be overly dramatic and Nurse Ratched has decidedly sociopathic tendencies, Vic and his father Gio are very much like a regular loving father/son duo.
It is only when one of Vic's trips to the junk yards ends with him bringin home and reparing an android named Hap that things start crumbling. Their idyllic (if atypical) family life in the woods is threatened when Gio gets kidnapped and Vic is left behind with the others, learning old secrets about the world and his father. It is then that the little remaining family decide to go to the City of Electric Dreams to get Gio back, no matter the cost.
First of all, let me say that I enjoyed listening to this quite a lot. The book does, however, have some pacing issues and - to me at least - lacked focus. Things start off so nicely and easily, with a fairy tale like introduction into who Gio and Vic are and how they came to live in the forest. While it is clear from the start that Gio is not human, no further details come to light until later. I loved how Klune established his cast of characters and their dynamics as a family. You can't really help but fall in love with the silly roomba and the murderous first aid kit on wheels, even if you tried. When Hap is introduced, it's also fairly obvious that if there will be a love interest, he is it. The romance is not a big focus in this book, I should mention, but it was a nice little side plot.
We spend a few lovel chapters at a rather slow, but never boring pace, in the forest until - bam! - Gio spills all sorts of secrets to Vic and Vic picks up his family to go on a long journey to the City of Electric Dreams. I found the cut between these parts of the novel a bit jarring, even if that was probably intentional, seeing as it mirrors how Vic gets ripped out of his everyday life as well. This is also when the world building takes center stage and we learn more and more about the world in general - humans, robots, wars, you can figure out the basics - and Gio's life in particular. The Pinocchio elements were cute and, I felt, really well transported into this post-apocalyptic setting.
I believe it was somewhere along the trip that the story lost me emotionally, however. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what the reason was, but I found my thoughts drifting off and noticed I wasn't as eager to get back to my audiobook as before. Maybe it's because all the big secrets come out rather early, because the ending felt kind of predictable from that point onward, maybe it's because the Quest was all laid out and now it was just a matter of taking the next step down the path? Or, if we're completely honest, maybe it was just me having a particularly busy week and being unable to focus the way I did before? That's always the thing with books - it matters almost as much when and how you read them as the words that can be found within their pages.
All I can say is that the second half of the book, although a lot happens in it and some of it is quite thrilling, objectively speaking, just didn't hook me as much as the slower, quieter beginning did.
I liked the ending - as I always do with Klune's books - although it's not exactly 100% happily riding off into the sunset. There was something almost anticlimactic about it that let the story fizzle out. Overall, I enjoyed it, I think it's a cute little story, but I am not sure what - if anything - Klune was trying to say with it about AI and personhood, or whether it was just meant to be a new and different type of found family. I'm okay with that, but I also don't expect this book to stick in my mind the way Cerulean Sea did.
MY RATING: 6.5/10 - Quite good
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