Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This was very disappointing, although perhaps I expected too much because it’s by Ishiguro and I normally love his books. Klara and the Sun is as beautifully written as you’d expect, but both the story and the world in which it takes place come up short, and I found it unpersuasive and unsatisfying. It feels as if he came up with the original idea but then couldn’t settle on a single storyline. Possible conflicts arise but are never followed through, emotional connections between the characters are inconsistent and not always believable, and many parts of the story are partially developed and then dropped. I agree that the book leaves you with a vague sense of sadness, but unfortunately that’s because the book is vague overall. Klara is an Artificial Friend, an expensive robot that can be purchased as a companion for teens, in this case 14-year-old Josie. From the beginning I struggled with the concept, partly because it seems like something that would be marketed to much younger children, and partly because Klara is remarkably uninformed. Her naïveté is supposed to be part of her charm, and is absolutely essential to the plot, but it’s hard to imagine wealthy parents buying a mechanical companion for a teenager and not wanting it to even have the potential to act as a tutor/help with homework— Klara is not even aware that the world is round or what sunset is, she has a kindergartner’s understanding of the world, and we are never given the impression that you can upgrade or add knowledge to her. It felt to me as if the author liked the idea of an artificial friend but didn’t really think through practically how a company would build them, or market them, or what people would buy them for. The plot circles around a future where some children have had gene editing, “uplift,” and others not. Sometimes it seems as if this will be a significant plot point, and we have many hints that all is not well between the uplifted and regular children, but it never is very developed. Josie has become ill because of something that went wrong with the uplift, but we never find out what went wrong. At different points in the book the adults around Josie have plans involving Klara, but none is really followed through. A younger sister apparently died of uplift gone wrong, but we don’t learn much about that. The final chapters fast-forward through several years and characters appear to have changed their personalities completely, but we aren’t given an idea why. The ending makes no sense. The Buried Giant handled its air of mystery and its ambiguous ending with flair, and drew you into its misty mythical world. Never Let Me Go was a superb ethical and moral tale dressed up as science fiction, and the whole world was thought through. Klara and the Sun is just vague, the world-building and characters inconsistent and poorly developed, and Klara herself unconvincing. This could have been so much better.