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.
Some books, you read slowly, taking your time with them and allowing the words to really sink in. Others, you devour because you need to know what will happen, or else it will gnaw at you in your dreams. In the Lives of Puppets was the latter for me. “I’ll read about 10–15% a day.” Ha! I finished it in 2 days.
In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune is positively leaking with humor and heart. I can’t say this with most books, but I can say it with Klune’s: I laughed, and I cried. If there’s one word that connects all of his novels, including this one…at least that I’ve read, it’s family. He has such a way of depicting family: biological and found that just grabs at your heart. It was true for Wolfsong, my first book by TJ Klune, and it’s held true for the rest.
It’s not like we haven’t heard this story before: secluded living, thrust into a new world by forces other than your own. Except…we haven’t heard Vic’s story. There’s comfort in the familiarity, in the hilarity of characters who aren’t trying to be funny. But there’s intrigue in the adventure, in the little Easter Egg references sprinkled throughout. There’s thankfulness in seeing another asexual character, in seeing a character with a stutter that keeps his stutter and isn’t “fixed.”
There’s an unasked question in this book: Do memories make you? And if so, yours? Someone else’s? Both? There’s a question about memory asked near the end of a chapter that’s answered soon after. That’s my favorite part. It’s not worded profoundly; it’s very simple. And that’s where the impact lies.
I can’t think of any other way to wrap this up. It’s almost midnight, so I might just be tired. All I can say is this: Read In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune, and become immersed in a story about family.
is it weird that I’m intrigued that the Character’s name is Vic? I’m Victoria and my family calls me that, haha.