TJ Klune (Flash Fire; The Extraordinaries; The House in the Cerulean Sea) tugs readers' heartstrings with In the Lives of Puppets, a sweetly angsty, wholly charming post-robot-apocalypse retelling of Pinocchio. Young human man Victor Lawson lives a happy, albeit secluded, life with his loving android father, Giovanni, and his friends Nurse Ratched, an endearingly sociopathic medical robot, and Rambo, a robot vacuum suffering a perpetual existential crisis. Their idyll short-circuits when Victor rescues Hap, a handsome, surly android, from a scrap heap and reactivates him. Hap has no memory of his past but, despite Giovanni's misgivings, he insists he will not harm anyone. Then androids from the outside world discover the family's location, abduct Giovanni, and take him to the City of Electric Dreams. Victor must confront the horrible secrets of his father's old life while leading Hap, Rambo, and Nurse Ratched on a rescue mission through the wilderness of the former United States and into the heart of a dystopian society populated by robots--where saving Giovanni may require dismantling the entire system.
This classic story, retold slant, combines snarky humor with ponderings about the power of choice and forgiveness. Victor's sidekicks steal the show as comic relief, especially wisecracking Nurse Ratched, who says of Hap, "I have a crush on him. Or I want to crush him." Victor identifies as asexual and has tender, complex feelings for Hap, underscoring the tension between artificial and natural life. Speculative fiction readers will fall in love with this whimsical, bittersweet fable. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads