Klara and the Sun
Klara and the Sun Book Review
I have been on such a journey lately. A journey of rediscovery.
For a while now, I have felt…bored with YA. Don’t get me wrong, there are some absolute gems. Dark Rise by C.S. Pacat and Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross come to mind.
However, a lot of the other YA books I’ve read in the last year or two have felt incredibly mundane, cliched, and tropey. They all feel the same.
So lately, I have been getting out of my comfort zone. I’ve been reading less YA and instead as many books as possible in as many myriad genres as possible.
It has been enlightening.
I feel invigorated with reading again, falling in love with words and pages like I did so long ago that set me on this path of creating book reviews and becoming an English teacher and writing my own book.
I haven’t written reviews for them all, but I’ve read Brave New World, The Outsiders, Murder on the Orient Express, The Women, and plan on reading an adult horror novel called Home Before Dark by Riley Sager and Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt soon.
All this to say, I’ve rekindled my love for stories and characters, all thanks to the variety of novels I’ve recently been consuming. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro is no exception.
Klara and the Sun is an adult novel that is told from the perspective of Klara, an artificial friend (AF). Klara is essentially a selfless robot who yearns to be put in a home and given a ward.
She watches the outside from her shop window, pining for the sun (she is a solar powered robot) and dreaming of the day she can go outside the shop on her own and be given a purpose.
Her day comes. Klara is taken home by Josie, a thirteen-year-old girl, and her mother. What unfolds is Klara’s experience in this new place with Josie and her mother, the people in their life, the despairing world around them, and a nefarious secret with ambiguous motivations.
I would get into the plot more, but that really is the basics. It would take an unbelievable amount of work to explain the complexities of Klara and this new life she’s found herself in and it’s better for people to read the book and see the mystery unravel for themselves.
Ishiguro as an author is really intriguing because he gives you nothing but bread crumbs. In a direct comparison to YA, Klara and the Sun gives you teensy morsels about society and the world, but never enough for you to piece things together until well into more than halfway through the book.
I only found this frustrating near the 200 page mark when I was desperate for answers. Up until then, though, I found it refreshing that an author wasn’t shoving lengthy exposition down my throat.
I will say that the ending of Klara and the Sun was anticlimactic for me. What you expect
to happen just…happens. There’s no twist, no shock, no great revelations. When you finally realize Klara’s true purpose it comes across as a bit…problematic, but it’s not that wild of an idea once you think about it more fully and realize all the foreshadowing leading up to it.
My favorite part of Klara and the Sun was Klara herself. I love the trope of robots becoming more human-like or learning about humanity (the movie, The Wild Robot, is a great example of this that I saw and loved recently). So I’m a bit biased when it comes to this trope in general.
Ishiguro’s writing wasn’t beautiful exactly, but very dialogue driven which I found interesting. I liked that he didn’t push his world building in my face every opportunity he got, but I would have appreciated a little more explanation about the society and world he created.
There are still facts and details that are hazy after finishing the book that I would have expected to be more fleshed out. It would have been a better book with more of everything expanded upon.
Recommendation: If you love robots becoming human as much as I do, you will enjoy Klara and the Sun. While it wasn’t the deepest read, nor one that I thought stuck the landing at the end, I still enjoyed the process.
I loved Klara’s POV, the ethics that arise from her place in the world, and the questions that popped up in my mind as a result from this story. As always, any book that makes me think is a book worth reading.
Score: 7/10
