In the Lives of Puppets: A No. 1 Sunday Times bestseller and ultimate cosy fantasy

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Many experts believe Milei will be forced to moderate after taking power next month and will struggle to implement his more controversial proposals. Milei’s party controls just 38 of 257 seats in Argentina’s lower house and eight of 72 in the senate. New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune invites you deep into the heart of a peculiar forest and on the extraordinary journey of a family assembled from spare parts. Victor Lawson lives with his father, Giovanni, in a spectacular treehouse complex in the middle of a giant forest. His life for the past 22 years has been solitary, but not lonely, thanks to his robot friends – Nurse Ratched (think Baymax, only sociopathic) and Rambo (if Dug from Up was a roomba). One day, while scavenging in the massive scrap yard near their home, they find a robot unlike any Victor has ever found. Unfortunately, this discovery starts off a chain of events that culminates in Giovanni being captured, with Victor determined to rescue him. Welcome to In the Lives of Puppets.

In a strange little home built into the branches of a grove of trees, live three robots—fatherly inventor android Giovanni Lawson, a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, and a small vacuum desperate for love and attention. Victor Lawson, a human, lives there too. They’re a family, hidden and safe. Milei’s biography suggests some of those ideas may have come from his five cloned mastiff dogs who are named after economists including Murray Rothbard and Robert Lucas. “They are like two metres tall, they weigh like 100kg … He calls them his four-legged children,” said Lemoine, laughing off claims that Argentina’s future leader takes political advice from those animals. Inspired by Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio, and like Swiss Family Robinson meets Wall-E, In the Lives of Puppets is a masterful stand-alone fantasy adventure from the beloved author who brought you The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door. Similarly, while I appreciate that Vic identifies as asexual – as asexual protagonists are not very common – it seems disingenuous that he lives set apart from the rest of society. He may be the only human left in existence. How could he possibly know that he doesn’t experience sexual attraction if he’s never been around anyone else? The book has an explanation, but the situation bothered me.

This fantasy/sci-fi mashup novel contains plenty of humor and heart. It asks interesting philosophical questions about humanity, many of which we glean through the eyes of robots. It’s a story of forgiveness, found family, and what it means to love unconditionally. It has accurate, positive queer representation, which is something the author, TJ Klune, always strives to provide. But on Sunday night Milei showed little sign of diluting his vision for South America’s second largest economy. “The changes this country needs are drastic,” he declared, announcing Trumpian plans to make Argentina great again.

In a small home, built into the branches of a tree, live a human named Victor and three robots. These are a pleasantly sadistic nurse machine, a small vacuum desperate for love and attention, and a fatherly inventor-android named Giovanni Lawson. Together they’re a family, hidden and safe. Rambo is an anxiety-ridden Roomba vacuum who loves to clean and ask questions. Nurse Ratched is a hilarious, sociopathic medical robot who finds joy in taking care of Vic and terrorizing Rambo…in a loving way. From New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, In the Lives of Puppets is a queer retelling of the Pinocchio tale, inviting you deep into the heart of a peculiar forest and on the extraordinary journey of a family assembled from spare parts. With all the recent discussions about Artificial Intelligence, the idea of robots developing emotions is one that should be considered. (And often is, let’s be real here.) The robots that make up Victor’s family experience sadness, loyalty, bravery, determination. They are every bit as human as the human they protect. It very much reminded me of Humans, in that it explores love and friendship between humans and androids and delves into how much humanity can be in a machine.Milei was more successful as a media personality, finding fame as an economic pundit on Argentinian TV shows where he would pontificate about both the misery of inflation and the joy of tantric sex. “Each man has his own dynamic. In my particular case, I ejaculate every three months,” Milei once boasted on air. As with many excellent dramas, everything changes when a stranger enters their lives and how we view the outcome depends on whether Victor is named for optimism or irony. The adventures of the book hinge upon the family’s discovery of an extremely handsome android almost dead in the Scrap Yards. They save his life and his presence heralds the end of a temporary idyll. Whether it is the arrival of the android, Hap, or the drop of Victor’s blood on the Scrap Yard floor, something in that discovery attracts the outside world, and the gears of plot begin to turn. A music-lover, Milei was the lead singer of a Rolling Stones cover band called Everest and, according to Lemoine, also enjoys Bob Marley and Verdi. “He loves opera. He sings opera. He’s not very good – but don’t say I said that,” she confided. In a machine-controlled dystopian future, Victor Lawson lives in a treehouse in an Oregon forest with his dad Giovanni. Vic is human, and Gio is an android inventor who raised Vic from infancy. Even before Milei’s victory was complete, Lemoine said she was certain her friend – and his sideburns – would prevail.

In the Lives of Puppets by T.J. Klune is published by Tor Books and will be available April 25 wherever books are sold.The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled 'HAP', he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio - a past spent hunting humans. The day Vic salvages and repairs an unfamiliar android labelled “HAP,” he learns of a shared dark past between Hap and Gio–a past spent hunting humans. Lemoine, whose stage name is Lady Lemon, said she saw striking similarities between Argentina’s president-elect and the volatile Marvel character. Some of the details are deliberately counter-realistic to illustrate some unspecified point about the need for organic relations between sentient beings. Most notably, the family repair Hap with wood so that he looks more like a puppet, while both Hap and Gio have had their batteries replaced by a complex wooden gear system finished off with a drop of Victor’s blood. And blood also stands for some ineluctable humanity that some in the book prize and others, dangerously, hate. Victor, a notably “real” boy, is starkly out of place in a land of robots and machines. Raised by Giovanni Lawson, his android father and inventor, Victor spends his days scavenging the scrap yards of another civilization for spare parts and hiding away from the detection of machines much larger than themselves. With his robot companions—an anxiety-ridden cleaning vacuum and a sarcastic and self-professed sadist nurse robot—they live happily in their wilderness workshop as a family. One day, Victor and the robots salvage a defunct and amnesiac android thrown out in the graveyards. Without telling his father, Victor repairs the android—offering him a new name (Hysterically Angry Puppet, or Hap for short), a new functioning heart, and a new life with his makeshift family in the forest. When Giovanni learns of Hap’s existence, it brings chaos that reveals secrets his father has hidden for years and a dark shared past that threatens their family’s safety. That chaos spurs Victor, Hap, and his companions on a life-altering journey from their idyllic treehouse in the forest to rescue his father from the City of Electric Dreams—a futuristic, robotic-run city void of humanity, free will, and the near-omnipotent power of The Authority.