Last year, TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets released to tremendous acclaim. This year, it’s releasing in paperback, making this story of queer robots and real love available to new readers! TJ’s here to talk his book and explain how he’s going to make you fall in love with a vacuum cleaner named Rambo.
Check it out!
Dear Reader,
Once upon a time, I took you to an island to find a home where one should not exist. After, I invited you to a mysterious tea shop where the living helped the dead find meaning and purpose, joy and acceptance.
For my next trick, I’m going to make you fall in love with a vacuum cleaner named Rambo.
Okay, wait. Let me back up a minute.
I am so thrilled to present In the Lives of Puppets, a queer retelling of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the following pages, you’ll be going on an adventure unlike anything you’ve seen from me before. Though this story deals with robotics, androids and machines of all shapes and sizes, it is firmly rooted in fantasy, a fable that explores the ideas of kindness, humanity, and forgiveness, including who has the right to forgive.
This book is not The House in the Cerulean Sea. This book is not Under the Whispering Door. There is no stuffy, bland middlemanager bureaucrat in need of a wake-up call or an attorney who finds life after death. There is no island to discover, no tea shop to make a home. This is the story of an already happy family who built each other up and carved out their place in the world. And this time I’m taking their home away from them. I’m sending them on a journey across a strange and dangerous country to save one of their own and fight to reclaim the happiness they worked so hard to build together.
But in this journey, you will find hints of the familiar: love, life, and the hope for a better future, all wrapped up in a story of loyalty in the face of betrayal and how even the smallest of us can make a difference when called upon to do so. It is also about the heart and soul of Victor Lawson—the main character, and the only human of the bunch. Though he was raised by machines, I set out to show that Victor’s humanity could not be denied, that it wasn’t something that needed to be justified or earned. It just is, and in this unforgiving place, it counts for something. Perhaps everything.
But Vic won’t be going it alone. He will have his friends with him: Rambo, the vacuum who wants only to be loved (so you better get on that, no pressure). Nurse Ratched, a nursing machine who has a few of her wires crossed, sadistically so. And a machine with a dark past. A robot with secrets locked away in his head. An android with blood on his hands and a heart in his chest: Hap, also known as the Hysterically Angry Puppet.
Together, they must do the impossible: travel to the soulless heart of this world and bring the last member of their family home. And in doing so, they will learn the truth about the past, the present, and the future of all things.
Are you ready for an adventure?
TJ Klune
Order In the Lives of Puppets in Paperback Here!
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