Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, explores the world of robotics and genetic editing. The story follows a teenage girl named Josie. Josie has an illness brought on by genetic editing called “lifting,” and it is Klara’s job as her robotic friend to take care of her and be there for her. This story is told from Klara’s perspective, and even with her limited vision, she has astute observational skills. As Klara watches her health decline, she uses unconventional methods to try to heal Josie. The book revolves around Josie's journey to recovery and the support she receives from Rick, her childhood best friend, Her mother, and the live-in housekeeper.
Klara’s unconventional healing methods stem from her time in the Artificial Friend store. There, she looked outside at the sun and believed it had revived a man and his dog on the street. Klara, being solar-powered, believes that the sun can give the power she receives to whoever it wants. After seeing the patterns of the sun's light in Josie’s room, she gets the idea of asking for the sun's help to heal Josie like it had done before. Rick supports her in this idea, although he doesn’t even know what the idea is, and does what he can to help Klara even after Rick and Josie have had a big fight. Josie’s mother tries something also unconventional. She tries to make an artificial version of Josie, not really helping her— more replacing her— but she tries to. Even when her health got bad, they didn’t give up their hope of finding something to help her. When she was unable to move, they still tried to do anything. When the sun faded behind the clouds in the morning, spreading darkness throughout the house, they all still ran to Josie when Klara said the sun had healed Klara. They may have not believed in her methods if she told them what they were, but they still hoped they worked. Kazuo Ishiguro shows the characters hope that Klara will get better throughout the book through their means of helping her with her illness, never giving up on helping Josie.
The world Kazuo Ishiguro built in Klara and the Sun has many different classes of people. The lifted and unlifted especially are shown under a microscope. The lifted are shown to be the future and the evolving class, but the parents lifting their kids are introducing new risks to the kid. As we see with Josie, she could have died due to the lifting, and for what? The lifting is supposed to help the kid, but all we saw it do was hurt Josie. The rich in Klara and the Sun put their kids into these risks and if the kid died, they replaced them with robots. Is this the evolution of humanity? The poor being left behind while the rich experiment on their kids with new technological advancements? Kazuo Ishiguro shows what happens when things go unchecked and uncontrolled—showing that we must be careful. After all, humans are not gods. Man tried to replicate life and ended lives in the process.
We learn that we have to be wary of new things and look at the pros and cons. The Klara and the Sun world may have advanced too fast and has led to pretty bad consequences for the people of this world. Communities of people that don’t want to risk their children being talked about badly, social pressure to do things they may not even want to do. This book was made for an experienced reader, one who can dig deeper and see more than what Klara does. Someone who doesn’t read many books, like me, may not be able to enjoy it as much while reading it. I can look back at the book and see deeper, but while reading I thought it was alright. Not bad at all, but it didn’t blow me away. I'm not saying it's not worth reading, but I wouldn’t read it again. If you used to read a lot and want to get back into reading, this is the book for you. I would rate this book a 6.7 out of 10. Kazuo Ishiguro is a pretty good author.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/7244300736?book_show_action=false