In the Lives of Puppets

In the Lives of Puppets Review

TJ Klune’s previous novels — The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door — established a recognisable register: cozy fantasy with genuine emotional stakes, found family as the central moral value, and a prose style that balances warmth with wit. In the Lives of Puppets keeps those commitments while taking on a world-building project larger than anything Klune has previously attempted.

The premise is a retelling of Pinocchio, displaced into a post-human future where robots have inherited the earth and humans survive in isolated communities, regarded as relics by the machine intelligences that run civilisation. Vic, who was raised by his scientist father Giovanni and a small family of eccentric robots in a forest far from the Authority’s reach, is as close to Pinocchio as the story needs: a figure caught between the human and the mechanical, belonging fully to neither world.

When Giovanni is taken by the Authority — the machine system whose control of remaining civilisation is absolute and whose memory of the old world is a wound it has never processed — Vic’s quest to recover him becomes the adventure that carries the book. The road narrative structure suits Klune’s ensemble instincts: each stage of the journey introduces new characters, deepens existing ones, and expands the world’s geography and history.

The dystopian post-human setting is more fully realised than anything in Klune’s previous work. The Authority’s bureaucratic horror — machines administering a world they have inherited but not understood — carries a satirical edge that the cozy surface of the book doesn’t always prepare you for.

The found-family resolution is Klune’s constant and his greatest strength.

The Robots Who Steal the Show

If the book has a secret weapon, it is its supporting cast of machines. Nurse Ratched, a medical droll with a cheerfully sociopathic streak and an unsettling enthusiasm for “drilling,” and Rambo, an anxious, big-hearted vacuum cleaner desperate to be useful, are the comic engine of the novel — and frequently its emotional core as well. Klune has always written ensembles better than protagonists, and these two are among his most memorable creations, capable of pivoting from absurd slapstick to genuine tenderness within a page. The risk, which some readers feel the book does not entirely escape, is humor fatigue: the Rambo-and-Ratched double act is so reliable that Klune leans on it heavily, and a few readers find the bit wearing thin across four hundred pages. But at its best, the banter does real work, making the found family feel lived-in rather than asserted.

HAP and the Heart of the Book

The story gains its weight with the arrival of HAP — Hysterically Angry Puppet — a decommissioned android that Vic discovers and rebuilds, and who turns out to have been a killing machine in the war that nearly exterminated humanity. The slow, fraught relationship between Vic and HAP, complicated by HAP’s returning memories of what he once was, is where the Pinocchio material acquires real stakes. It poses the book’s central question: can someone built for one purpose choose to become something else, and can he be forgiven for a past he did not choose? This is the romance and the moral engine at once, and it lifts the novel above its cozier predecessors.

Coziness Meets Genocide

The most discussed feature of In the Lives of Puppets — and its most divisive — is the collision between Klune’s trademark warmth and the genuinely dark premise underneath it. This is a world where machines have committed something close to genocide against humanity, where the Authority’s bureaucratic cruelty is rendered with real menace, and where the body horror of Nurse Ratched’s “care” is played partly for laughs. For some readers the contrast is thrilling, a cozy story with surprising teeth; for others the tonal whiplash between gentle found-family comfort and literal extermination never fully resolves. It is the book’s biggest gamble, and your mileage will depend on how much dissonance you can hold.

Reworking Pinocchio

Klune’s inversion of Collodi’s fable is clever: here the “real boy” is the human, Vic, and the puppets are the robots who raise and surround him, with his android father Gio standing in for Geppetto. The longing at the heart of the original — to be seen and accepted as fully oneself — is redistributed across the whole cast, each of whom is in some way trying to become more than their programming. When the retelling works, it gives the road-trip adventure a mythic resonance; when it strains, the Pinocchio beats can feel bolted on rather than organic, a complaint several reviewers raised. On balance the scaffolding earns its place, lending shape and depth to what might otherwise be a looser picaresque. There is even a Blue Fairy analogue and a journey toward a maker who might grant a wish, touches that reward readers who know the source while remaining legible to those who do not.

The Verdict

In the Lives of Puppets is TJ Klune’s most ambitious book, trading the contained, domestic settings of The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door for a sprawling post-human world with real imaginative reach. It does not entirely reconcile its cozy instincts with its dystopian premise, and it leans hard on a handful of comic devices — but its world-building is Klune’s richest, its robot ensemble is a delight, and the Vic-and-HAP relationship gives the familiar found-family theme a genuinely new charge. For Klune devotees it is essential; for newcomers it is a strange, warm, sometimes uneven entry point into one of contemporary fantasy’s most beloved voices.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Klune’s most ambitious novel: a Pinocchio retelling in a post-human world that stretches his world-building while keeping his characteristic warmth intact.