Klara and the Sun

Klara is an Artificial Friend (sometimes pejoratively called a “machine” or a “robot” by people in the novel) built to be a companion for a child. She is chosen by Josie, a young girl with fragile health who lives with her mother and a housekeeper in the countryside. The story is told from Klara's perspective, as she learns about Josie's health problems and family life. Klara is focused on helping Josie, so she strives to fit into the household routine and meet the family's expectations for her, but she also acts independently to provide a very different, un-machine-like help to Josie.

Since Klara is the narrator, and she is curious and observant of subtle human emotional responses, she is easy to empathize with. There are aspects of her that make it clear she is a machine (her vision sometimes divides areas into quadrants, or she occasionally sees people as cones and cylinders), but she is a sympathetic machine–I thought of Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. This premise, that a machine could exhibit human like qualities, is a familiar one. But this novel also highlights an emotionally fraught discussion about whether there's anything in a human life that can't be replicated by a machine, if the subject is observed closely enough and the engineer is skilled enough. One of the adults in Josie's life admits to having a hard, cold center that believes that such a thing is possible. Klara and the Sun is written with such spare elegance and suggests such blurred boundaries that I found it moving rather than trite.