It’s admirable that the voice is so in synch with Klara, an artificial friend (AF). Also really liked the theme. It’s effective at making you think about what truly nourishes us, as humans, and how we treat things that we define as objects and subsequently deny humanity and empathy. We have a very messed and complicated relationship with how we construct our values. The fact that the story succeeds at eliciting so many interesting notions, for me, was pretty enjoyable.

The detractors though, for me, were that the voice, as fitting as it is, is really quite basic, structurally, and that grated on me after a while. It’s quite interesting at the start, since it’s effective at communicating who Klara is and how, despite having a limited and point of view, literalized through a store window, complex things can be distilled to simple language and create complex understandings. But, then I can’t separate that it’s just not fun after a while to read sentence structures that are so repetitive and in engaging. It’s hard not to zone out sometimes.

Finally, I think that this isn’t actually new on any front. It made me think a lot about bicentennial man and A.I, and speculative fiction around androids and robots earlier on. This feels like mostly retread ground. There’s a mix of hope and sadness mixed with utilitarian prose. It feels like something dated with a new coat of paint, though still clearly valuable.