I DNF’d “In The Life of Puppets” by TJ Klune. Which made me really sad. I ***LOVED*** Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door, but this one, after getting halfway in, I just was not connecting with at all. It wasn’t sweet enough to be romantic, not engaging enough to be a sci-fi adventure, and the allegory of “The machines/puppets are so human like” was so blatantly obvious and not interesting, so it’s just this weird purgatory space of trying to do all those things but not doing any particularly well.
The side characters were also much weaker compared to his other works. The side characters in Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door were funny and weird, but they had depth too (won’t go into detail since this isn’t meant to spoil those other two books, you should just go read them). In Puppets, they’re extremely one-note, and therefore not interesting. It’s just the same repeated jokes over and over and over, which is not inherently funny or endearing. I also hate that Nurse Ratched in particular is both a one-note joke, but also a catch-all swiss army knife that can do anything just because (why can a nurse droid hack one of the Old Ones, download its data, and use it as a gps system? Why can she run a program that’s a whole safety bunker routine?).
The whole puppets/machines becoming sentient and fighting against their programming theme doesn’t make sense either, since Rambo and Nurse Ratched both appear to be fully sentient themselves, yet somehow we’re also supposed to believe that the sentience that HAP is getting and that Gio has/had are different just because they have a “heart”? They’re all the same. Just because Rambo likes to clean still, he;s still shown doing other stuff and having other interests and feelings and emotional reactions about things. Same with Nurse Ratched (despite her claiming the contrary).
Anyways, I was disappointed by this book, since I loved his other two books very much. For those that read it, how did you feel about it? Am I being too harsh? Are there details I overlooked, or does it somehow all get fixed at the very end?
by Merobiba_EXE
3 Comments
There’s a rumor that he really wanted to write a book that was more explicitly about autism, but the publisher and maybe a sensitivity reader put the kibosh on it. So if it feels kind of hastily constructed, I think he was putting together a book he didn’t really believe in.
It sounds like you had a really difficult experience with this DNF. I’m sorry you had a tough time with it, but it’s great that you went ahead and shared your experience with the community here. Thanks for being candid and helping other readers make informed decisions about whether they want to go ahead with this book.
I have the same thoughts! I absolutely loved house in the cerulean sea and under the whispering door, but I got 40% of the way through this one and it has been sitting on my shelf unfinished. I think it’s just not for me unfortunately.