Early Review – The Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune (4/5 stars)
Reading Level: Adult
Genre: Science Fiction/Post-Apocalyptic/Humor
Length: 417 pages
Publisher: Tor Books
Release Date: April 25, 2023
ASIN: B09Y461DKX
Stand Alone or Series: Stand Alone
Source: eGalley for review from NetGalley
Rating: 4/5 stars
“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?”
Series Info/Source: This is a stand alone book. I got an eGalley of this book through NetGalley to review.
Thoughts: Previous to reading this book I had read Klune’s “The House in the Cerulean Sea” (loved it), “Under the Whispering Door” (loved it), and “Tales from Verania” (liked it). I ended up liking this story a lot but not loving it as much as I loved Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door.
This book is set in the future where a robot, Gio, has raised a young human boy, now older, named Victor. Victor finds another decommissioned robot in the scrapyard named HAP. This find triggers a series of events that reveals secrets that Gio has kept from Victor and Victor ends up on an unlikely adventure to the City of Electric Dreams.
Compared to Klune’s normally flawless writing style, this book felt a bit off to me. It starts slow and a lot of the sex robot jokes and the heavy theme of sexuality throughout the book seemed a bit jarring when taken with the other themes of family and love. This was almost like a blend of the prevalent sex jokes of the “Tales of Verania” and the themes of love and family of “Cerulean Sea” and “Whispering Door”.
Additionally, although I grew to love the quirky characters here, at points they felt over-characterized. Rambo was just sooo ignorant and naive, and Nurse Ratchet was sooo serial killer crazy…etc. It just took me awhile to fall in love with them and really engage with them. This is another thing I haven’t had an issue with in Klune’s previous books.
I did enjoy the adventure Vic and crew had on their way to the City of Electric Dreams; this is where things really started to pick up for me (I think that was about halfway through the book). The overall world-building and plot seemed a bit tired. The whole “humanity is taken over by the AI they created” theme has been done sooo many times before. There were some small twists to the theme and story that helped this book not to feel completely stagnant.
The book was easy enough to read and there is a lot of goofy humor in here that had me chuckling. The story leaves you feeling happy and hopeful. I enjoyed the book but just didn’t fall into it and love it as much as other recent Klune novels.
My Summary (4/5): Overall I really enjoyed this book, but it wasn’t as amazingly awesome as Cerulean Sea and Whispering Door were. It took me a bit to get into the story and engage with the characters. I also felt like the world-building was a bit lacking. It’s a fun read though and if you enjoy the whole “what it means to be human” in a world of robots, you’ll probably enjoy this. I did love the humor and the crazy characters. I am eager to see what Klune writes next.
