Book: TJ Klune's "In The Lives Of Puppets"

Happy National Read A Book Day! Unfortunately my latest book, number fourteen of the year, was not the greatest book I've read.  TJ Klune's "In the Lives of Puppets" starts with a lot of potential that is squandered by the end of the book.

In many stories about lone robots trying to survive in a world of humans, this book turns the story on its head.  The story takes place over a hundred years after the last human has been killed by the robots and a robot civilization flourishes.  In this world a robot designed to be creative - creative in ways to kill humans - has a change of heart and creates a living human child who he raises in the isolation of the forest.

There are so many possibilities in this flipped storyline but they are wasted.  What happens is not interesting and is often mired in emotional histrionics.  The robot civilization is too ... human.  This makes no sense since the robots had determined that the humans were destroying the environment.  Why, after destroying the humans, would the robots parrot the civilization they destroyed?  It didn't make sense to me.

I gave this book three stars out of five on Goodreads.  It ranked this high because of the potential in the book, not on its execution.  I was disappointed.