Introducing, the book that I wished I would have never spent 21€ on… I picked up a copy of “Klara and the Sun” for a book club, first having started reading the physical book, then having switched over to the audio version while I was on a trip and in the end finishing it in its physical shape. The book ended up disappointing me in both its versions. I find audiobooks to generally be tricky, depending on the narrator. In this case here, I couldn’t stand the narrator’s voice and the way she tried to imitate dialogues with a British accent was just painful to listen to. I have been dreading writing a review about this one and only got around to it more than a year after I finished reading it.

The book fits into the category of those that are too generally hyped and end up being a disappointment. This has previously been the case for me with Matt Haig’s “Midnight Library“. The storyline within “Klara and the Sun” was really predictable, the dialogues felt forced and I couldn’t warm up to any of the characters. About 100 pages into the story, I noted down that it felt trivial and read like a young adult book, even though it’s not classified as such. Below two examples of what the dialogues were like:

“Henry?” the Mother said. “May I go now to your studio? See what you’ve been doing?”

“Of course. Follow me.”

p. 197

“It’s okay.” The Mother placed a gentle hand on Miss Helen’s upper arm. “It’s okay. It’s difficult, I know that.”

“But I’m doing my best now. I’m doing my best for him this time round. I just need Former Lover to turn up. Oh! That’s him there. Vance! Vance! Excuse me…”

p. 239

One could argue that it was an artistic choice to write the dialogues in an artificial way since a big part of the story focuses on robots, the difference between them and human beings, as well as artificial intelligence. Both passages above are dialogues between human beings though, so it just all felt odd.

All in all, the book just was too naive and simplified for me. The only reason why I decided to go for the 2/5 ★ rating instead of the lowest one was because there was an interesting underlying idea to it. Trying to understand whether or not robots could ever replace human beings, as well as the argumentation behind it at least motivated you to contemplate the subject further yourself. Nevertheless, this is definitely a book that you could skip and wouldn’t miss out on anything by doing so.

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0-571-36488-6
Faber & Faber, 2021}