This was a much anticipated release for me! I’ve really enjoyed TJ Klune’s other books and jumped up and down when I got this last minute approval! It lived up to the hype for me all the way through to the end, and I wasn’t left disappointed.

Klune always does an awesome job making bringing all the things I love from my childhood books with magical characters and adventure. In this case, it’s snarky robots with nods to Pinocchio throughout the story. The characters definitely gave me MST3K vibes and tangentially reminded me of my favorite comic book series, Akiko. Both solid favorites and this felt similar without ever going too close, so it’s no surprise I loved this too!

My only complaint is that I feel like the love story was unnecessary and pulled from the strong friendship/found family and family heart of the story. I get that popular opinion demands love, but this was so solid without it! Give me all the Nurse Ratched, Rambo, and Gio! Still a lovely story with great representation as always.

Don’t hesitate to pick this one up!

TJ Klune’s books just feel like a warm hug. This one was more adventure than his others but the characters were so lovable and there were so many heartwarming quotes throughout the book. I can’t wait for his next one! I received a free copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

🌳 In The Lives of Puppets - TJ Klune

4 ⭐️- Pinocchio meets The Wizard of Oz meets Westworld. This book was such a fun, exciting ride. TJ Klune truly knows how to write a magical story with lovable, spunky characters. If you’ve read Klune’s other books, I definitely recommend this one.

In a strange home built in the branches, there lives 3 robots - Giovanni Lawson, a fatherly inventor, a sadistic nursing robot, and a small vacuum searching for love an attention. Victor Lawson, a human lives there too. When Victor salvages an old android, he finds out about a dark past between “Hap” and Gio. When Hap alerts robots from Gio’s past about his, and his family’s, whereabouts, they are no longer safe. When Gio is taken back to where he originated, Vic and his friends set out on a journey to find and save him.

This is such a sweet story. It reminds me of Pinocchio with its inventor/inventions and hiding from the bad guys. It reminds me of The Wizard of Oz because of the fun filled journey Victor and his friends take. It reminds me of Westworld because of its robots and their desire to take over. (does AI scare anyone else right now?) This is a story of unlikely friendship turned family, growth, adventure, and finding what’s important in life. I love the way TJ Klune tells a magical adventure story and I love all of his quirky fun characters. I definitely recommend this, The House in the Cerulean Sea, and Under the Whispering Door if you haven’t read them. HIGHLY recommend all of these on audio!

Thank you Netgalley and Tor Publishing for the early ARC.

I loved it. TJ Klune has fast become one of my favorite authors. There is just this feel of kindness, love and acceptance intertwined in all their stories and I can’t get enough.
In the Lives of Puppets has a Pinocchio twist that is so clever. I loved Vic and his humanness, each character is unique and has so much to offer. It’s a great group full of heart and so many laugh out loud moments. But it’s also endearing and sad at moments.
A beautiful story about finding your family and what you would do to keep them safe.

I love love love T. J. Klune and his writings! The characters are so lovable and genuine. In The Lives Of Puppet was the same. I immediately fell in love with Rambo and nurse Ratched. T.J.Klune is a master writer and thinks outside of box with his story telling and characters.

Thank you @macmillanaudio @torbooks and @netgalley for the complimentary audiobook and gifted galley. This amazing, lovable, imaginative masterpiece is available for purchase at your nearest bookstore. Grab your copy today. It’s a perfect summer read!!

TJ Klune is one of my favorite authors and when I saw that he would be releasing a new book this year I was very excited. I applied for an ARC without expecting to get it and was over the moon when I got approved.

I went into this book with high expectations, but found a story quite a bit different than I was expecting. The only way that I can adequately describe the difference is to say that Cerulean Sea and Whispering Door were more sweet and feel good, where as Puppets is more snarky, edgy, and didn’t really have the warm fuzzy effect of the previous books.

I did really like the main character Vic. He was relatable and I loved how curious he was. I also appreciated his creativity in how he restored HAP and his reasoning behind learning to build a heart.

I also enjoyed Gio and thought his backstory was one of the most compelling parts of the book. I thought the concept of how he grew and learned was cool.

That said, I didn’t love most of the supporting characters. Both Nurse Ratched and Rambo were misses for me. I found them very repetitive, which I get, they’re robots, but it just didn’t work for me. Some of the more minor characters that showed up in the story also were kind of lackluster.

One thing that was significantly different was the type of humor in this book. There were a lot of poop, sex, and dick jokes which were amusing once or twice, but started to get really repetitive.

I will say that I really appreciated that the main character was asexual. I haven’t seen a lot of good asexual representation, so I really appreciated this.

All in all, this story was underwhelming for me. I really wanted to love it and I’m sure a lot of readers still will, but it just didn’t have the magic that some of his other books had for me.

I did also receive an Audio-ARC copy and found the audiobook to be well done. The narrator does a fantastic job of interpreting the various characters and bringing the story to life.

I was given an Arc copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I love TJ Klune and he’s done it again!

I will say I struggled to get into this book but once I did I couldn’t put it down! I feel like we keep getting the same books with different characters over and over but then here’s comes TJ Klune with something brand new for us to fall in love with.

This book was absolutely incredible and I will definitely be recommending it to everyone!

There’s something innately beautiful about each and every book that TJ Klune releases.

That beauty comes from the fact that he infuses every single novel, from The House on the Cerulean Sea to Under the Whispering Door to Wolfsong, all of which occupy a quirky, cosy slice of fantasy-goth/dystopian-apocalyptic literature, with an innate, fervently buoyant humanity which celebrates what it means to be connected, part of a family and be loved without condition for who you are.

For anyone who has been rejected for their true self or bullied to within an inch of their life, existential or otherwise, or has felt adrift in a world without family or friends to call their own, Klune’s books are a warm and huggable balm for the soul, as well as being a muscular treatise on why unconditional love matters so damn much.

His latest gem of a novel, In the Lives of Puppets, very much fits into that mold, telling the story of the strangest of found families who, despite defying conventional ideas of who belongs together – and let’s be fair, convention usually gets it more wrong than right and is often so narrow it could crush you with its unimaginative strictures on what is and isn’t acceptable – are just what each other needs, now in a warm and fuzzy present and later in a nightmarishly adventurous present where so much of what they love and value is put very much in mortal jeopardy.

Set at an indeterminate time in the future – the novel at one point refers to something having not been the case for centuries so we’re talking well down the chronological line here – In the Lives of Puppets centres on a family of four living hidden deep in a verdant forest in what they refer to as Orey-gone – father Giovanni Lawson, sociopathically hilarious medical worker Nurse Ratched, cleaner Rambo and Victor, a young man who tinkers and invents in his lab high in the trees (their home is a treehouse built by Giovanni) and who is fond of visits to the local scarp yards where all kinds of salvageable goodies await.

The big point of difference here, and it is a doozy, is that Gio, as he’s often known, Ratched and Rambo are all machines of one kind or another, while Victor is very, very human, his presence, we are initially led to believe, the product of two people racing through the clearing where the treehouse sits and thrusting their baby into Gio’s arms.

The truth turns out to be something else entirely, and while that is best left to the reading, the reality is that however Victor came into Gio’s life, his presence is something the three robots value more than anything in the world, with Rambo, who’s impishly, delightfully naive and sweet and Ratched, who’s acerbically funny, and brutally playful with a heart of gold, especially grateful to the young man for rescuing them from the scrapheap.

It turns out, and this only emerges when Vic, as he’s referred to by his family, rescues an android called “HAP” from the junkyard, that the reason why Gio raced to find sanctuary far out in the woods many years earlier is because machines have taken over the world, working to rid the planet of their “pest problem” known as humans, all while enforcing a group think which punishes free thought by any machine.

Leaving aside the irony of machines rising up against their makers only to be enslaved by their own kind, this dark reality means that no one can find the family or Vic is most certainly dead; unfortunately though, somehow the Authority in the City of Electric Dreams tracks Gio down and he’s captured and taken back to his old lab where he reprogrammed to be something entirely terrible and not at all the kind loving father he rebelled against his programming to be.

Victor decides he can’t simply let Gio be surrendered to a mindless fate worse than death, and so the four remaining family members – Hap is accepted but only with great reluctance by the other three who all struggle with the fact that’s he’s an ex-people killer; granted his memory is wiped and he remembers noting of this but still, he’s scary and dangerous until he proves not, which he happily does – set off across a machine-run America to find and save Gio, regardless of the dangers such as suicidal mission poses.

The threat posed weighs most heavily on Vic of course, who is likely the last of his kind, and the object of virulent hatred by an unyielding machine mind authoritarianism which maintains it wiped out humanity for the good of the environment but which essentially has far darker, murderous motives at work.

On their journey, Vic has to wrestle with whether he can accept love, as the book’s blurb notes, “with strings attached” from Hap who it turns out is more than capable, just like Gio, Nurse Ratched and Rambo before him (but even more so given his bloodstained past) of thinking for himself and choosing a path more kindly inclusive, connected and loving that was in place previously.

At every juncture, In the Lives of Puppets is a supremely affecting delight and joy.

Yes, the stakes are fearsomely terrifying, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will emerge unscathed but somewhere in the middle of all the love and family on the chopping block narrative there is so much light, and hope and hilarity – the banter between Rambo and Ratched alone makes the heart sing, with Rambo a particular slice of happy naivety that makes you feel good to be alive – and a celebration of queer identity and a robust defense of being yourself and for being loved for that authenticity that you feel as if you’ve been gifted with the biggest of all hugs albeit tinged with possible treachery and loss.

In the Lives of Puppets is yet another feather in Klune’s considerable cap, a story that admits how dark life can be, horrifyingly so in fact, but which also knows how powerful love, hope and connection can be and how, with that on your side, pretty much anything is possible, even in the face of the greatest and bleakest of odds.

I think that anyone who loved House in the Cerulean Sea would adore this book. This book is so quirky and fun.

Overall I did enjoy this book, though at times it did kind of drag. First off I have to say that I absolutely adored Rambo the anxiety ridden Roomba and Nurse Ratched. Their banter was awesome. So we start off with Gio finding this place in the woods and deciding to fix it up, he then decides that it needs to be bigger, as he ran out of space, and starts to build up. One day, he meets a couple who are on the run from something and they end up leaving behind who we come to know as Victor, their child. We get to watch them grow as a family until one day the Terrible Dogfish come along and destroys their him and take Gio away. Now we have the adventure in traveling to City of Electric Dreams to get Gio back. The story is kind of a cross between the Wizard of Oz and Pinocchio IMO. We do find out what became of the world and the humans and some secrets come to light. I didn’t feel that we actually got to their HEA, but we were pretty darn close.

While I didn't enjoy this as much as Klune's two previous novels, this one still has his fun writing style. Found friends through and through, this post-apocalyptic story has all the machinations of the Pinocchio retelling that it is. The characters were fun and entertaining & the sheer acceptance they had in each other was really beautiful. I found the build up and overall main conflict resolution a little lackluster.

Part Pinocchio, part terminator, part gay love story, all mixed together with some humor and a lot of spare parts. The characters are well developed and very messy. Nurse Ratched might save you or drill you, Rambo will always say the most inappropriate thing at the most inappropriate time. Gio is old and wise, until he isn't, and Victor is a typical teenager raised with no peer group who might have to save them all. They all come together to create a family, and they will do anything and go to any length for each other. This story doesn't say much for the human race, and I think I'm going to turn off all the technology in my house, or at least not let any of it communicate with each other, but this is meant to be a spoiler free review, so make that decision for yourself.

Thanks to NetGalley and Tor/Forge for an advance copy. My opinion is my own.

I needed to sit before writing this review. I LOVED Cerulean Sea; it was my top book of last year. I made everyone in my family and friend circle read it. So, when I was seeing reviews that PUPPETS was just as good, I was pumped! However, I didn't find this one to be as good. I did enjoy it. There are some really funny moments, and some moments where I couldn't help but smile. Rambo was cute, Nurse Ratched was funny, but I didn't connect with this story as much as Cerulean Sea. I loved the found family aspect, and I think this one is best done on audio to keep all the characters straight.

I received an advance copy. All thoughts are my own.

Do I even need to tell you to run out and get the newest TJ Klune book at this point?? If so let me just say that I spent so much time laughing/cackling OUT LOUD because of this book both in a dark room alone and in the presence of other humans and that has NEVER happened. It was funny, stupid, and stupid funny all at the same time wrapped around Klune's signature heart and comfort. Be it ebook, audiobook, physical book, buying, or borrowing PLEASE give this title a chance to steal your heart.

"In The Lives of Puppets' by TJ Klune is a dystopian Pinocchio retelling full of heart and substance. This is one of the funniest books I've read all year. The robot vacuum had me laughing out loud! The characters are unique, complex, and heartwarming. I highly recommend this sweet book to all readers!

This is a dystopian story where the robots humanity created are now in control. It’s about the found family of android Giovanni Lawson, his human son Victor Lawson, and their companions Nurse RATCHED and Rambo and the newest addition of android HAP, expanding horizons, and being brave.

As usual, TJ Klune has crafted a masterful, heart wrenching tale about beating the odds and finding love in the unexpected. It’s also full of little Easter eggs for his dedicated readers to find.

I also have listened to the audio, and Daniel Henning was spot on.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Tor Publishing Group, and Macmillan Audio for the privilege to escape into the newest TJ Klune world by gifting me both a digital and audio ARC. The audiobook was amazingly narrated by Daniel Henning - 5 stars!

Gio leaves the City of Electric Dreams and finds a house in the woods where he starts his new life. Gio becomes dad to Victor, the last human on the planet, as well as his companions Nurse Ratched and Rambo. They find a robot in the junk yard, Hap, that Victor brings back alive. When Gio is taken, the group go off to rescue him.

This book is reminiscent of PInocchio and I loved this book and these characters - plus the narration is just wonderful so you will feel like you know them (especially Rambo). Everything has a touch of magic and humor, but at the heart of all TJ Klune's books is the sense of inclusion, acceptance, friendship, loyalty, and love. This is an absolute must read (and listen to!) if you are a fan of TJ Klune!

In the Lives of Puppets is a mix of Pinocchio, The Wizard of Oz, and Wall-E in TJ Klune's newest found family novel. I absolutely loved all of the characters in this novel, but Nurse Ratched was perhaps my favorite. I loved her sassy attitude and how she would do anything for those that she loved. She didn't let the fact that she was an android get in the way. Klune's writing made me quickly fall into the world and I didn't want to leave. I was slightly afraid of going into the novel after not loving Under the Whispering Door, but I shouldn't have been afraid. In the Lives of Puppets blew me away and in a good way. I know I'll be re-reading this in the future and recommending it to friends too.

3.5 stars
TJ Klune has such a way of creating complex characters that tug at your heartstrings, even when they aren't human (i.e. a robot vacuum and nurse bot). He captures the both the joys and flaws of humanity so well and weaves it into his magical stories. While I had a tougher time falling into this book plot-wise than I have with some of his previous books, I did still enjoy it and many aspects of it. Nurse Ratched's one-liners were excellent, I wanted to give Vic a big hug, and the "tree house" painted a lovely picture in my head. There were times where I felt like plot was very start, stop, start, stop, but overall I think many will enjoy this book.

I am excited for this one and a big fan of TJ Klune. Thanks to NetGalley, TJ Klune, and Tor Publishing Group for the opportunity to review this ARC in exchange for an honest review.