#2 - Klara and The Sun Book Review
Friday 27th of June, 2025
Category: book-reviews
This book has stuck with me since the first time I read it. I was a teenager, around the time I was becoming interested in computing and anything techy. It made an impression on me during a time when the discourse around AI was quite negative, and quite frankly, still is. I don't quite remember when I bought it, or what the circumstances were around me buying it, but I'm so glad I did. I occasionally re-read books on my bookshelf, and when it came time to picking my next read, Klara and The Sun was an easy choice.
A little intro intro the book: Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF), a hyper-intelligent humanoid machine built for human companionship, who one day meets Josie, a fourteen year old teenager, at the display window of the store in which Klara is being sold. Klara and Josie seem to connect instantly, and soon become best friends. In my opinion, this is a story of friendship, love, resilience and faith.
What I like most about this book is how Ishiguro takes you on a journey though the lense of a machine, at the same time making you feel as though you were watching a child take their first steps, learning about the world around them, observing all the people in their lives. The line between human and machine is so paper-thin when writing consciousness and humanistic traits into a machine, android, whatever you can to call it, and I would think a lot of people would probably cross that line without even realising. Ishiguro found the perfect balance. He writes not one, but two coming-of-age storylines: Klara's and Josie's. It didn't feel forced at all, their relationship grew and developed over time beautifully. The flow of the book felt natural; There are no chapters per say, but that made it all the more easy to plough through the book.
The ending made me feel sad, but a happy kind of sad. We all know how much life can change, especially during our most formative years. For me, the moral of the story is to be kind, do good, and good will come to you.