with ktor, are we able to access the response body at all if we use a serialized class as the response type?

I hope you dont use java serialisation (which is a security problem)

serialized with a small 's'. 🙂

You could get response first:

val response = client.get<HttpResponse>(...)

and then receive from it:

response.receive<MyData>()

Thank you, will try it, although, does Ktor throw on any error?

It can, depends on your case.

Http errors it will throw on, yes?