Never Let Me Go

For me, this book will be memorable and the story is unusual. It's told with a deftness that permeates the book, from the viewpoint of one of the major characters, Kathy. She and Ruth and Tommy live at an English country house and school with large grounds variously appointed. They are close friends, living with dozens of other children who were conceived for medical purposes. Their lives have apparently been set on a course, which they have been indoctrinated to accept. That is understandable, however, I wondered all along the way why they didn't just leave this path once they're adults and no longer at the home. They were educated and could have found employment; there was no reason given why this couldn't happen. None. Seemingly, only their own minds kept them on track, accepting a terrible fate.

The terms carer, completed and donor and several others are eventually understood by the reader, though they're descriptive enough to hint at the meaning. The story is personal, about the three people involved, and the emotions and thoughts of these three, the interpersonal relationships, are revealed with stark reality. Their situation is anything but reality, at least at this point in time.

Fascinating book. The author stayed in voice the entire book, in character. The story is odd enough with several unanswered questions that I didn't feel it was a 5, though it could be for the writing alone. And for the fact that it's memorable. Ishiguro has his own unique writing style, which I love.
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I'm not sure why, but this novel resonated with me on a number of different levels. Despite the sometimes irritating backtracking and diverging of the narrator, I liked her generally unreliable memory, which lent itself to the idea that the students at Hailsham were always (intentionally for some, unintentionally for others) blind to the truth about their own existence. I thought it worked as an allegory for existentialism or for the relations between first- and third-world nations (where Hailsham students represent the first world, able because of its relative privilege to entertain the illusion that their own deaths might be deferred). ( )

sadly by some premonition I figured out what it was all about half way down the first page and never recovered from that. Was sorry I kept with it by the end. ( )

This book was like 2lbs of potatoes in a 10lb bag: a little bit of good stuff, but mostly stuff that didn't need to be there to get the story across. ( )

This book was weird. I was left with almost as many questions at the end as I had at the beginning. I just picked this book up at a bookstore because it had one of the "employee recommendation" tags. I didn't know the plot. I hadn't seen the movie. I was aware that it was scifi, or at least had something weird going on, but I didn't really know what to expect. Well, this book is even more angsty than teenage Harry Potter, and the boarding school setting doesn't even have the benefit of magic. But it was interesting to see Western culture through an outsider's (the clones') lens. And there were big questions about what it means to be a human, or whatever. I think this book was a little too pessimistic for me. I don't know. This is why I should always wait before reviewing books. It takes a while for something like this to sink in, especially something weird like Never Let Me Go. I can tell this is going to be the kind of book that I think about on and off for a long time. But I also feel like I didn't understand the point. It was written as a memoir of sorts, but, as much time as I had spent inside Kathy's head, I was left questioning her humanity in the end as in the beginning. Takeaway: it was interesting to read, but I'm not sure I changed as a person by reading it, even though I think I should have? Maybe time will reveal the true impact of this book. ( )