Lucas Stoffel

Klara and the Sun Book Review: Kazuo Ishiguro has spent his career writing about people who don't fully understand their own lives — the butler in The Remains of the Day, the clones in Never Let Me Go — and with Klara and the Sun, he does it again with an artificial intelligence so gentle and so earnest that she becomes the most human character in the book.

The Amber Spyglass is the book where Philip Pullman finished building his cathedral and then knocked it down. This is a children's novel about the death of God, the liberation of the dead, the nature of consciousness, and two children who fall in love and must be separated forever. It should collapse under the weight of its own ambition. It doesn't. It soars.