In the Lives of Puppets

Deep in a forest, a small, unconventional family lives quietly apart from the world. Victor Lawson, a gentle and inventive human boy, has been raised by Giovanni Lawson — a kind android father — alongside a wonderfully strange household of machines: Nurse Ratched, a medical robot with a sadistic sense of humour, and Rambo, an anxious, endlessly loving little vacuum robot. Victor keeps to himself, salvaging and repairing discarded technology, until the day he brings home a decommissioned android named Hap and switches him back on.

Hap remembers almost nothing of who he was — but what he was built to do is far darker than Victor could imagine, and reawakening him draws the attention of the world Giovanni fled long ago. When that past catches up with them, the family must leave the safety of the forest and journey toward the City of Electric Dreams to save one of their own.

A tender, funny, and quietly radical reimagining of Pinocchio, In the Lives of Puppets is T.J. Klune's science-fiction fable about found family, free will, and what it means to be human — even, or especially, when you are not.