There were such subtle nods to the original details, yet with a creative albeit scientific twist that made me smile - made me cry - made me hurt - the vividness of urgency for all that transpired on their journey to save his father - the desperation that clung to Victor as he attempted to make sense of everything that was happening, all the lies that he had been told about his life - it was so achingly raw and I breathed those words with such intense longing. Overall, yes, it’s an original, creative, clever story which many other readers rightly love but I don’t fully connect with it. Special thanks to NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for sharing this amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest feedback. Overall it’s still an entertaining read, and maybe I was expecting more having connected with the other books so well, but it was a pretty standard story, albeit an unusual premise. Until one day, Victor repairs an android named Hap, and Gio is captured and taken to the City of Electric Dreams, forcing Victor and the robots to embark on a dangerous journey to save Gio.

Author TJ Klune invites you deep into the heart of a peculiar forest and on the extraordinary journey of a family assembled from spare parts.He glanced down at them, hanging on to the pile of scrap via a pulley system he’d constructed with a harness around his waist. This could have been quite a dark fantasy being set in the apocalyptic world and dealing with tough topics. It is arguably the most ambitious novel I’ve written, but I never lost sight of what’s important: queer storytelling, and the power people have when they come together, even if more than a few of them are made of spare parts.

Then I discovered IN THE LIVES OF PUPPETS was due out soon, so I quickly requested it from NetGalley and here we are. Anyway, so normally the books I read remind me of a few other things (like a song or a movie), and I know this is a loose retelling of Pinocchio, but I was reminded me of about a million other stories!

When Victor, Rambo and Nurse Ratched discover a decommissioned and damaged android who they name Hap, after his visible letters H.

I can’t even count how many times this book made me laugh, made me smile, made me cry… it certainly packs a wonderful punch! It's familiar enough so you can recognize some of the points of the story, but it's different enough that it feels completely new and not just 'Pinocchio but Sci-Fi'.He’d found the little thing years before, repairing it himself with metal and care until the machine had come back to life, demanding to be allowed to clean—it needed to clean because if it didn’t, it had no purpose, it had nothing. To have a story sink into your thoughts and wrap itself around your heart and leave you discombobulated afterwards, there's no other feeling like it in the world. Being queer himself, Klune believes it's important--now more than ever--to have accurate, positive queer representation in stories. It's the story of a journey, of invention and discovery, of finding who you are and what you are made of.