In the Lives of Puppets

 

In the Lives of Puppets by T. J. Klune.  432 pp

Victor lives with his father, Gio, in a series of tree houses in a forest adjacent to a scrap yard.  He enjoys seeing what the scrap yard has to offer, but it is dangerous.  Several machines guard it from outside interference.  He already found a vaccum which he repaired and named "Rambo" and a robot nurse called Nurse Ratched (Ratched is actually the initials for Registered Automaton to Care, Heal, Educate, and Drill).  One day while in the scrap yard, Victor finds an android that seems to still be alive.  Unfortunately, by the time he removes everything on top of it, it is no longer functioning, but he takes it home to his lab to tinker with it.  Eventually, he is able to repair everything but the battery that makes it work.  He takes a heart he made in case his father needs it (Gio is an android, too) and puts a few drops of blood in and the android comes to life.  The android doesn't know who he is or what his purpose is, but he has some initials on his body HAP, so that is what Victor, Rambo, and Nurse Ratched call him.  Nurse Ratched also calls him Hysterically Angry Puppet since he is very grumpy.  When Gio sees what Victor has done, he is upset since Gio built HAP originally as a human destroyer (HARP stands for Human Annihilation Response Protocol) and Victor is a human.  Some government androids realize that HAP is alive and that there may be a human around, so Gio makes everyone go into a safe room.  The government androids take Gio back to the City of Electric Dreams and destroy his heart.  When Victor and his friends emerge from the safe room Gio is gone and the tree houses have been destroyed.  They they go on a quest to rescue Gio.

This is not my usual type of story (not big into Sci Fi), but I had read another T. J. Klune book and wanted to read this.  The robot friends are very funny (shades of MST3K).  Many reviews say this is a modern day Pinocchio.  I can see this as Gio creates Victor (he is already a "real" boy) and there is a workshop/lab for tinkering.  I really enjoyed it.