SNAPSHOT
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.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.
When Hap unwittingly alerts robots from Gio’s former life to their whereabouts, the family is no longer hidden and safe. Gio is captured and taken back to his old laboratory in the City of Electric Dreams. So together, the rest of Vic’s assembled family must journey across an unforgiving and otherworldly country to rescue Gio from decommission, or worse, reprogramming.
Along the way to save Gio, amid conflicted feelings of betrayal and affection for Hap, Vic must decide for himself: Can he accept love with strings attached? (synopsis courtesy Gizmodo)
If you’re an inveterate reader like me, you will be acquainted with the long-lasting joy that comes from finding an author you love and having the distinct and sustained pleasure of reading as many books of theirs as you can get your hands on.
It’s happened time and again to me and whether its Peter F. Hamilton, Julietta Henderson, Claire North or a host of others, you can’t wait until you have the privilege and pleasure of disappearing into another of their wondrous stories.
One author in particular who has captured my heart recently is TJ Klune, a queer writer who concocts the most emotionally meaningful, vibrantly thoughtful and delightfully escapist books and who has taken me back to the books of my youth where wonder and magic, and some hard-hitting emotionalism all came together in the one beautiful package.
He writes sublimely well, wrangling words with the artistry of a poet but he also invests what he writes with such intense emotionality and yet charming sweetness that you feel as if someone has gone deep into your soul, knows what’s there and is speaking just to the deepest, most hidden away parts of you.
Books of his like The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under the Whispering Door are a joy to read because if you’re a queer person, they are loaded with so much that you know intimately and truly; but even if you’re not, there’s so much raw universal humanity, that you will connect with his luminously wonderful tales on a visceral level.
With one of his books, Wolfsong (Green Creek #1) next on my TBR, and a new book In the Lives of Puppets coming in late April, it’s a good time to be a TJ Klune fan and to discover how transformingly meaningful reading his books can be. (Click on the link for In the Lives of Puppets and you can even preview read the first two chapters!)