Summer 2026 Book Club: Klara and the Sun
Learn more and register for the Association for Academic Leaders’ Summer Book Club.
Book Review by Danielle Passno, Assistant Head of School at The Browning School
Generally speaking these days, I am exhausted by AI. Whereas there was a point over the last three and a half years when I was a sponge for understanding, lately I have found myself withering under the pileup of AI exegesis and carnage that has become my inbox. I have been craving something new. Fiction is often the antidote to fatigue, which is the energizing force Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun offers to school leaders who are artificially fatigued. Both novel and cautionary tale, Klara plays with the idea of what, if anything, makes humans unique. In a world where it is the duty of an Artificial Friend to learn as much as they can about their special human friend, what stops machine-learning from becoming human-replacement altogether? Themes of creation, loneliness, and purpose offer enough material to keep both admin team meetings and classroom discussions immersed in questions of what actually matters within the walls of a school and the agreements of a society. Specifically, in schools that offer pathways that could either be avenues for flourishing or roadways of superficial success--depending on how they are trodden--Klara invites us to question how far is too far in the tantalizing pursuit of social status and economic success.
It is no surprise that Ishiguro once again had the prescience to write about a world not yet available to us; he’s been dazzling, and scaring, us for decades with his ability to provoke questions about the nature of reality and our connection to it. Published before the launch of ChatGPT, perhaps what makes Klara and the Sun so valuable to our collective grappling with how artificial intelligence will change our understanding of experience and existence--and the extent to which we will stretch the limits of what we can do versus what is wise to do--is Ishiguro’s success at compelling us to empathize with, and perhaps even root for, the only character in the book who is not human. Klara’s keen observational skills, careful attention to her charge Josie, and her programmed desire to fulfill the wishes of her human employers can make her seem human. At what point does “human-enough” become good enough? And what happens in a world so consumed by the desire to avoid pain or loss that in the end the only hopeful and moral beings are those who are not beings at all? In Klara, Ishiguro offers a space in which we can contemplate the essential question of our age--what makes a human a human?
