If you don’t want to watch my review, look below for a transcript of the video. 

Rating: 3 out of 5

Genre: Science Fiction 

Technical Reasons to Read it: Dialogue, Characters, and a well-done retelling. 

Hello friends!

Today I'm going to be reviewing In the Lives of Puppets by T. J. Klune. As usual, the first half of the review will be spoiler-free, more about my overall thoughts, whereas, for the second half, I’ll be doing a more technical review. There will be spoilers there to help you strengthen your craft. 

So, if you don’t know anything about me, I was obsessed with The House on Cerulean Sean. It’s the one book that I tend to recommend to everyone – all kinds of different readers. It is quoted as the happiest book with the Antichrist. Who doesn’t love that kind of book? The characters. The heartfelt storyline. The fun plot. If you haven’t read it yet, I’m now recommending it to you. 

Anyway, The Hosue on the Cerulean Sea, made T.J. Klune an instant read for me. When In the Lives of Puppets was just sitting on the shelf at my library, I knew that I had to grab it… mine. And I quickly fit it into my reading schedule. 

I also hate to admit this, because I feel like it’s going to haunt me forever, but was I the only person that didn’t realize this had anything to do with Pinnochio? I feel dumb. I'm not the biggest fan of Pinocchio either. It's just not my jam. But when I saw the whale, I should have been clued in. The retelling does a cool flip with the characters though, marking it high on my list of retellings. 

But, since I'm not a fan of Pinocchio, I wasn’t a fan of In the Lives of Puppets. Klune held onto the reasons that I love him, making it a book I could finish. His characters are probably the reason that I kept reading. They’re the reason this book got three starts instead of two. One problem I find with authors is that they can’t write outside the voices that they’ve already created. T. J. Klune didn’t have that problem. He wrote entirely new characters and I fell in love with them. 

If you’re an Iron Flame fan like me, the part when the talking dragons came hooked me for life. And just like talking dragons, Klune pulled it off with robots. Yes, please! Love. Love. Love. When you have great characters, you’re also given great dialogue, amazing depth, action, and spunk. All of this makes the book a fun read. It gives you a few giggles. And overall, it was the sole reason I loved the book. 

But there needed to be something more to ground me in the plot. It felt vanilla to me. There’s the typical something bad happens and now we must go on an adventure to fix said thing. Then add in a morale conversation. That’s a Klune’s thing. He loves his moral conversations. Ideas to shape the world. And something was interesting in his acknowledgments when he said this wasn’t the book I planned on writing, but it’s the book that came out. The world isn’t ready for the book he wanted to write. So hmmmmm… what can it be? Did he want to do something else with the robots? Does he have thoughts on AI? I need more. If he writes another robot book I might have to give it a true. 

Now look away if you don’t want spoilers. 

Because here we be entering the technical review. 

My biggest problem with In the Loves of Puppets is that it felt like Klune was checking off boxes for the character and leaving little room for the imagination. So he wanted a sympathetic robot character. Check. He wanted sassy but still loveable. Check. Need them to be funny. Check. Give them an empathy protocol to make them more human. Check. 

The other issue was Gio. He was a character that did these bad things. Then he realized that he did something wrong and he ran away. He decided to grow a human child to get back at the evil society. Now he’s going to sacrafice himself for said child, because he loves him so much. Everything is check, check, and check. Okay, I get it, but I wanted more. I wanted some depth. And from all of this came a moral story of right and wrong and…

What’s going to happen with the robots?

Boring. Maybe I’ve read too many books. Can you read too many books that nothing sounds interesting anymore? Because of the way Klune kept checking off the boxes to incite some emotional payoff, the payoff wasn’t there in the end. I couldn’t cheer for the characters. I couldn’t believe him. In the end I even knew what was going to happen. It was obvious that everything was going to be okay. 

From a technical scifi look, there were a couple of rules borken. More of a question first… leave a comment below to let me know your thoughts. Everyone’s memories are wiped…. Where are the robots memories stored? Somehow they came back? That wasn’t because of the heart right? The heart is a combination of wood and gears and nothing else. Saying it’s the blood is weird to. That’s Victor’s blood and now you’re saying that his memories are fueling the robots. Help a girl out here. 

If I’m right though, than that means Klune broke his own rules.

I don’t like that. 

For a positive note,I thought that Klune’s retelling of Pinocchio was super, uber unique. I find that a lot of times, retellings stick to the original story certain pieces are picked out. Klune made the real boy and boy and the puppets robots. Love. I don’t think you have to be Pinnochio fan to love the similarities. The blue fairy is another story. I felt that it was too over the top and on the nose. And even though it was breaking rules, I enjoyed the heart and the blood, even if I had to tamp down my electrical engineer brain. 

There are a lot of good reasons to give In the Lives of Puppets a try, especially if you’re a fan og Klune. If you like Pinnochio, than I think you’ll really like this book. From a technical side, the dialogue and characters are well done. I think that’s a good enough reason to read the book, especially if you’re teaching yourself how to write a good book.

Happy Reading!

Love,

Kait