Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Refer to my previous blog for book details.

I was very much prepared to love this book. I liked it very very much but I didn't fall in love with it. It's hard to review the book without giving too much away but I'm including the Editorial Review from amazon.com here:

All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.

Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her
life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure.

--Regina Marler

The writing is amazing and the characters are wonderfully fleshed out. But I just couldn't get myself lost in the story. As I was reading, I was acutely aware of the mystery/non-mystery (the twist of the novel) that was hovering in the background, which is why I think I couldn't get more involved in the story.

BUT, I would definitely recommend this novel and I'm looking forward to reading more Ishiguro. I might even read the book again someday. But not any time soon as I have another 1,000 books to go.


Next book: On Beauty by Zadie Smith