V171 reviewed In the Lives of Puppets by T. J. Klune
None
2 stars
A bit of a miss as far as the TJ Klune feel-good books though, but not necessarily a surprise unfortunately. His reliance on recapturing the magic of Cerulean Sea is starting to get in the way of his own creativity.
Vic has a simple life. He lives with his dad Gio and his two best friends, Nurse Rached and Rambo, two robots he found in a nearby scrapyard and fixed. This small found family lives in the woods, where Vic has lived his whole life. One day he comes across another robot seemingly dumped into the scrapyard, and he decides to fix him up as he has before, but his father immediately seems tense when seeing this new robot for the first time. Gio, being a robot himself, has kept secrets from Vic, secrets about his own past and Vic's. And while Vic has never really needed to question why …
A bit of a miss as far as the TJ Klune feel-good books though, but not necessarily a surprise unfortunately. His reliance on recapturing the magic of Cerulean Sea is starting to get in the way of his own creativity.
Vic has a simple life. He lives with his dad Gio and his two best friends, Nurse Rached and Rambo, two robots he found in a nearby scrapyard and fixed. This small found family lives in the woods, where Vic has lived his whole life. One day he comes across another robot seemingly dumped into the scrapyard, and he decides to fix him up as he has before, but his father immediately seems tense when seeing this new robot for the first time. Gio, being a robot himself, has kept secrets from Vic, secrets about his own past and Vic's. And while Vic has never really needed to question why he seems to be the only human around, he's confronted with that reality when Gio is kidnapped by robots who are clearly hunting Vic down. So he, Nurse Rached, Rambo, and their new friend Hap set off in search of Gio and in search for answers.
Sigh. So this wasn't great. I don't blame Klune for basically cloning the tone of Cerulean Sea over and over again, but it wouldn't be quite as bad if they were of similar quality. Whispering door was fine, but I personally felt that it was a bit too same-y as Cerulean, but this feels like a drop in quality.
As you might imagine, this is a.. retelling? Reimagining? Of Pinocchio, but with a twist. But in an attempt to tie in the original story to this one while also integrating his own novel story beats, it just came across as messy. Motivations weren't clearly laid out, we didn't know why anyone was doing anything. Story beats were included haphazardly, things just happened to happen. The pacing was all over the place.
Perhaps most egregiously, the character work was really lacking. Vic was.. nothing. No personality. Not even someone the reader could project themselves onto. Just a complete lack of a character. The "romance" was totally undeserved and hastily included. It felt as if it couldn't really land on a consistent tone, with some characters fluctuating between middle-school toilet humor and deeply serious themes.
I didn't even dislike this, I just didn't feel anything about it. It is a book I read and it will not stay in my memory.
