TJ Klune
Fiction 2023 | 420pages
You know immediately, when you start reading this book, that it is not really about robots, even though three of our four main characters are robots. It is about people ... our idiosyncrasies, quirks, feelings, emotions, insecurities, communication styles, strengths, skills ... all the characteristics someone might program into a particular robot.
We have Victor, our one human. GIO is the robot who raised Vic from infancy. Rambo is the small vacuum robot, and the Nurse robot (Nurse Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate, And Drill ... Nurse Ratched for short). Rambo loves everything about life, and the Nurse is not only brilliant, but I love it when she turns on and off her empathy protocol ... "Engaging Empathy Protocol" she says!
The four of them live on their own, way out in the forest, having no contact with the outside world. The relationships among them are loving, with lots of kidding and caring. They each bring unique proclivities to the family they have formed. Individually and as a family, Klune has created engaging and interesting distinctive characters with strong personalities. They have lovely conversations and fun teases with sexual overtones. They often make me laugh.
One day, Vic and Nurse Ratched and Rambo travel to one of the many Scrap Piles placed in the wilderness to see what they can salvage. They find the remnants of a robot named HARP, who has been decommissioned and has no memory, nor a working battery pack. They bring him home and attempt to get him operational again. After weeks of work, they succeed, and HARP renames himself as HAP. And now, there are five.
Everything is delightful up to this point. Then a crisis occurs and GIO is kidnapped by other robots, and the rest go to look for him to bring him home. Their journey begins as they travel towards the City of Electric Dreams, where they believe GIO is being held. And the story starts a slow decline, in my opinion. The journey is okay, but once they reach the City, there are way too many robots, too much chaos, too many robots with odd, sad, and destructive designations. We lose the tight connection of the family in this electric maze (as I suspect our main characters also feel), and I become bored to tears. My four-heart rating drops to three and then finally to two, as I force myself through the time in the City. There are 200 pages in the middle of this book I would pull out and rewrite to maybe 30 pages. Not surprisingly, the story reengages near the end, as the five characters become a family again (it's not as easy as it sounds!!) out in the wilderness.
I am disappointed in this TJ Klune, whom I enjoy, and am just hard-pressed to recommend it, unless you are way more interested in the machinations of robots than the workings of humans.
(My apologies to the friend who recommended this book to me. Keep on recommending please!!)
January 2025