A science fiction book based in a time where children grow up with an AI best friend. They are there to comfort the children, help them develop and give them strength and security to tackle the adult world once they grow up. We follow the robot friend Klara, and their human friend Josie, throughout Josie’s childhood. Through the eyes of Klara we learn about the world they live in, the social interactions between humans and AI and her observations act as a looking glass and a reflection on our own society.

Although the story unfolds through the eyes of Klara, we experience the story from Josie’s perspective as well. While Klara tries to understand the world in her own way, as the reader you know what is actually going on. For example, Josie is upset after a fight with her neighbor boy, and even though we don’t have all the details it’s clear what happened and why Josie feels that way. But then Klara tries to understand it in her own way. It’s an interesting perspective to try to make sense of emotions in a rational way.

We see how Josie grows up with Klara and shows us one of the possible future of how AI will integrate with our lives. Unfortunately, the world building surrounding AI was a bit lacking. Although most rich kids have a robot friend, we see little interaction between Klara and them. The story is focussed on Josie and Klara.

A bit of a dystopian feeling that I always have about the future with AI, is also present in this book: because the children grow up with an AI best friend, they lack social skills to interact with each other. Because all the kids want one, it not only creates a social divide between rich kids and poor kids, it creates this feedback loop every new generation of AI is the new thing, rich kids get dependent on it and it becomes a necessity, rather than a cool thing to have.

All in all a nice story, but I would’ve appreciated more if the world building was more expanded. We only see AI in the form of best friends for children that get discarded when they grow up, but we do not see how AI is integrated in other aspects of life.