Lies of a Toymaker: A Pinocchio Retelling

In Lies of a Toymaker, a retelling of the classic Pinocchio, Paige, a queer teen and wooden toymaker’s daughter, is slowly turning into wood, and must cross the demonic Land of Toys to stop the evil Deathsprites before they destroy her world.

Award-winning author Kelly Jacobson (Tink and Wendy, Robin and Her Misfits) delivers her latest fairytale retelling in this cross between the classic Pinocchio and a Stephen King novel like The Gunslinger, Paige (a queer eighteen-year-old girl) is a wooden toymaker’s daughter dragged from state to state as her mother, Petta Vitaly, hawks her creations from their caravan. When they finally return to Petta’s hometown, Paige discovers Toy Palace, her family’s animatronic toy business, but she keeps the discovery from her mother--only to find that she has begun to turn into a wooden marionette.

With the help of two girls who use Paige’s interest in them to pull off the heist, Paige breaks into Toy Palace and finds out some of the family history her mother has been hiding from her. Though Paige is abandoned by the two girls, she discovers a captive fairy in one of the upper rooms of Toy Palace, Prince Alexio, who shows her that an entire realm, the Land of Toys, has been destroyed by fairies called the Deathsprites--and that her family has been using Prince Alexio’s powers to help the evil fairies gain power through the animatronic toys they have been selling for the last eighteen years.

Unable to cope with this new information, Paige runs away from Toy Palace and the captive prince, but her mother and a Toy Palace manager end up rescuing Prince Alexio instead. He finds Paige and takes her to the Land of Toys, where the Deathsprites have been turning sweet toys into terrible monsters determined to kill everything in their path. With the help of the talking cricket and Paige’s newfound strength as a marionette, the two must cross the realm of piled toy parts and frightful creations to stop the Deathsprites from making a portal to Earth that will bring destruction on that planet, too.

Lies of a Toymaker is a queer feminist YA retelling of the classic that reexamines what it means to ＂lie＂ for the benefit of others, and how the lines between truth and fiction are not always as clear as they seem. The book is told from several different perspectives, but follows Paige’s journey most centrally. Many classics from the original story make an appearance, such as the whale, the talking cricket, the fox and the cat, and the Fairy with Azure Hair.

Kelly Ann Jacobson is the author of the queer young adult novel Tink and Wendy, which won the Foreword Reviews INDIES Gold Medal for YA in 2021, as well as the queer young adult novel reimagining Robin and Her Misfits (Three Rooms Press), which was an INDIES finalist. Kelly has published many other books for adults and young adults, including the chapbook An Inventory of Abandoned Things, which won Split/Lip Press’s 2020 Chapbook Contest, and the literary speculative fiction novel Weaver (Livingston Press). Her short pieces have been published in Boulevard, Southern Humanities Review, Daily Science Fiction, and many other literary magazines. Kelly is the Assistant Professor of English at the University of Lynchburg and also teaches Completing the Novel for Johns Hopkins’s MA in Writing. Kelly received her PhD in Fiction from Florida State University in 2021. She currently lives in Virginia.