“Is that a whale?” Dad asked, pointing at the screen. “Yes,” Vic said. “And it’s going to swallow us whole.”

Prepare to be transported into TJ Klune’s dystopian fairy tale world where robots rule the world. Meet and fall in love with robots Giovanni, Rambo, Nurse Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate, and Drill (Nurse Ratched for short), and Hap in this modern retelling of The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Like his previous two novels, Klune manages to create a wholesome, exciting, and whimsical story in In the Lives of Puppets. It’s not hard for the reader to fall in love with his flawed but extremely charming characters. His writing has his readers smiling and laughing along with this loveable bunch throughout the novel. Klune writes amazingly creative and compelling stories. And although he, once again, pulls it off, this time he doesn’t manage to excel.

TJ Klune grapples with some of humanity’s biggest questions in his latest novel. Such as: What happens when robots become sentient? Is it possible to overcome natural instincts? What is free will and how do we handle it? And maybe most harrowing: will humanity continue to survive, and more importantly, should it? But I’m getting ahead of myself now. Let’s wind back a little bit to when all was good in this world. Let’s go back to the Forest.

In the Forest, exiled robot Giovanni (General Innovation Operative) has created a home for himself. All that is missing is someone to share it with. As luck would have it, one day, Gio is entrusted with the care of Pinocchio – erm, Victor – a real boy! Victor, following in his adoptive father’s footsteps, becomes a creator himself. In a place called the Scrap Yards, he finds the decommissioned robots Nurse Ratched and Rambo and fixes them up. Little Rambo is an overly anxious and extremely gullible robot that absolutely loves to vacuum; he is a Roomba after all. And Nurse Ratched is a vintage (one does not dare call her old) robot with sociopathic tendencies.

I often found myself laughing out loud while reading. Sometimes the book gave off the feel of a parent watching a Disney movie with their child and laughing along with the jokes only the adults will understand. Although the novel’s premise might seem light-hearted, Klune handles serious themes (sexuality, anxiety, depression) by wrapping them in fun packaging. He makes light of these heavier subjects with little jokes (although sometimes it feels a bit overdone). When Nurse Ratched, for instance, tries to make Victor feel better about his “intense anxiety disorder” by saying that everyone is unique, Rambo interludes with a squealed “hooray!”, exclaiming that they “all have things”. These scenes usually occur when the trio visits the Scrap Yards – a dump for decommissioned robots and parts.

At the Scrap Yards, they usually only find parts of robots, or robots that are beyond repair, but one day they come across a dying android. Hap (aptly named Hysterically Angry Puppet) is a severely damaged robot, running out of power. After fixing him up with wooden parts and a new energy source, Hap is ready to join the family (although he’s a little less friendly and a little too aggressive). By fixing Hap up, they accidentally send a signal to the bad guys – we never really learn what their evil plans are – which leads to Giovanni’s abduction. The androids that show up urge Gio to come with them voluntarily, but when he argues, they wipe his memory and take him against his will. Victor and the others have seen all of this unfold in a hiding space, unable to do anything about it. Our found family must now rescue Gio from being decommissioned, or worse. And thus, the story begins…

Although, at its core, the book is a retelling of Pinocchio, it is brimming with references to other literary works. Nurse Ratched, named after the antagonist in Ken Kasey’s 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, definitely shares some of her namesake’s maniacal tendencies. Our Nurse Ratched, however, despite all her pretence, is more magnanimous than she lets on. Victor is both Pinocchio as well as Victor Frankenstein. Klune winks at the 1818 Mary Shelley novel when Hap first wakes up in Victor’s laboratory. “’It’s alive,’ Rambo whispered fervently. ‘It’s alive.’”. There is also a Big Brother-like entity à la George Orwell’s 1984, that in the past purposefully hunted humans down to ensure their extinction and now records and surveils all robots to ensure that none of the robots ‘suffer’ from free will.

Speaking of free will: Klune nods to Frankenstein again when Hap starts to question what it means to have free will. Nurse Ratched, unable to find an adequate answer for him, says she must have disappointed Asimov. Isaac Asimov is, of course, one of the greatest science fiction writers. He coined the term “Frankenstein Complex” (hats off to Klune for this full circle moment); the fear that robots will develop a will of their own and eventually usurp humanity and even eradicate it. Ironic then, that this is exactly what happens in Klune’s novel.

While Nurse Ratched admiringly invokes Asimov, Klune’s novel does exactly what Asimov grew tired of. In an introduction to The Rest of the Robots, a 1964 collection of eight robotic stories, Asimov tells his readers that “[he] resented the purely Faustian interpretation of science”. Asimov then deviates from the norm by creating benevolent robots, set on helping humanity rather than eradicating it. And although Klune’s readers fall in love with Gio, Rambo, Nurse Ratched and Hap, they are the exceptions and not the rule. It turns out that robots have evolved into human-like androids: some able to smell, feel, emote, some motivated by monetary gain, others even seek sexual pleasure in the City of Electric Dreams (Klune’s take on Las Vegas). Contrastingly, in the first part of the book the reader sees only the kindly androids that surround Victor. I even wrote in my notes that I found it refreshing that the novel wasn’t a cautionary dystopian warning against what the future holds. I spoke too soon, as it turned out.

Klune dedicates his novel to humanity; even if it “kinda sucks”, he feels the universe will allow it to stick around for a little while longer. In the novel, he briefly touches on why humanity ultimately becomes eradicated. Gio tells Victor a little bit about humans: “Some devoted their lives to lifting each other up. Still others fired guns in deserts and schools, closed borders against those seeking shelter, enacted rules and laws to hurt the most vulnerable.”

The robots eventually sought to fix what humanity had broken, Gio tells Victor. Mankind refused to listen, simulations were run, and all tests concluded the same: “for the world to survive, humans could not”. Is this not exactly what Asimov dubs the Frankenstein Complex? Klune attempts to not fall into the Frankenstein Complex trap by introducing robots that feel and smell and are able to improve themselves, but in the end, he still tells a story of how robots overthrew humans.

Although it functions as the most obvious reference, I think it’s worth looking further into Klune’s debt to C. Collodi’s 1881 The Adventures of Pinocchio. Klune prefaces the different parts in the novel by quotes from both Collodi’s novel and the Disney film from the 1940s, and many of the characters from the original novel make an appearance. The Blue Fairy, in this novel an unlikeable god-like robot, can be found in Heaven (our world’s Las Vegas Luxor Hotel). The logo for the Authority is a cat and a fox; you will probably remember that in the Disney film, two of the antagonists are a fox called Honest John and a cat named Gideon. The bad guys travel in an aircraft that looks like a whale and, given its name in Collodi’s novel, is called – you guessed it! – the Terrible Dogfish. And finally, our friends are abducted by the Coachman. Unlike the original Coachman, who is sadistic to his core, this one makes a full one-eighty and tries to redeem himself. He eventually helps our friends and becomes essential to the ease with which Victor is able to continue his search for Gio. Instead of weeks, it now only takes days to get to where they need to be.

This is, unfortunately, the point where Klune began to lose me a bit. I am a big fan of Klune’s previous work and hitherto Klune has not shied away from difficult journeys or endings. Having the characters face difficulties that they are sometimes unable to overcome has added greatly to the plot in The House in the Cerulean Sea (2021) and Under the Whispering Door (2022). The turnaround of the seemingly evil Coachman was completely jarring, seemingly only to get on with the plot rather than adding anything to it.

The novel does a lot of things almost well. Although the intertextuality of the novel is oftentimes funny, it also sometimes feels misplaced. The novel is a Pinocchio retelling but combined with all the references to other creative works, it also feels a little overdone at times. In many interviews Klune has explained that he wishes to intersperse his stories with accurate and positive, yet subtle queer representation. And he does do queer representation deftly (Victor is asexual and gay, the Blue Fairy is non-binary, and in a brothel in the City of Electric Dreams we encounter couplings of all sorts). However, the seventh time someone mentioned that sexuality is a spectrum, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes a bit.

Compared to his previous novels where everything felt so perfectly balanced, I was left slightly disappointed. That being said, Klune is still an author unmatched in style and the book is certainly enjoyable – and maybe more so if your expectations aren’t tainted by the masterpieces that are The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door.