"'Sometimes,’ she said, ‘at special moments like that, people feel a pain alongside their happiness."
★★★⋆
Klara and the Sun follows Klara, an AF (artificial friend) through her life, from being in the store with manager and waiting to be chosen, to living her life with Josie, the girl who chose her. It is an exploration of what it means to be human, from the point of view of artificial intelligence. Through ups and downs in Josie's life, Klara learns about human emotions, the human thought process, and how humans connect.
Klara and the Sun immediately stood out to me - I wanted to read this book from the moment I read the blurb. It's a character study of humanity in general, but set an indeterminate amount of time in the future - where AI is common place, and a number of "improvements" have been made to humanity and the way we live.
There were certain aspects of this that I adored! Telling the story from the point of view of AI is incredibly clever, and really got across the message of hope, love, and learning. The characterisation in this is brilliant, all the characters were as fully formed as you'd expect them to be (from a non-human POV!), and Ishiguro's writing really showed the ups and downs of human emotion.
However, I would've loved more detail. The world in which they were living was half formed - I wanted to know so much more about how life then differed to life now, what advancements were in place? There's references to children being "lifted", and while I could work out a broad context through reading the entire novel, I wanted to know more about this process and why it resulted in what it resulted in.
I also felt the ending was a little rushed. It seemed as though there was so much focus on the main story that Ishiguro forgot that he had to end it, and rushed to finish everything off perfectly in the last ~20 pages. I did like how there wasn't a perfect ending, and how Ishiguro injected a little sadness with how it ended, but I still wanted more from this.
Overall, a good read, I just wanted so much more from it! I've heard some of his other books are brilliant, so I definitely think I'll give another Kazuo Ishiuro novel a go.
Content warnings: chronic illness, child death, separated/single parents,
Buy this book on Hive, Bookshop.org, Blackwells, or Waterstones, or your local!
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