Never Let Me Go

I'm not sure how I feel after reading this. I loved The Remains of the Day a ton, and I expected to like this one even more because of the added sci-fi layer to Ishiguro's writing. Instead, I feel a little cheated and let down; while the writing and story were certainly very good, it just didn't hit the same way for me as The Remains of the Day did.

Briefly (as there's many other much longer reviews here to peruse for detailed plot points), the story is written from two points: Kathy later in life as a “carer”, and Kathy early in life as a student at Hailsham boarding school. From the beginning hints are dropped from both points in time that something off-kilter is going on with the kids at Hailsham, and whatever that something is followed these students even after they left the school. We follow Kathy as she reminisces about her time at Hailsham and after, about the relationships she developed primarily between Tommy, Ruth, and herself, and how they developed and changed over the years, shadowed the entire way by the “something” hanging over them all.

I liked the first third of the book the best, when the kids were still at Hailsham and it felt like a reader-driven detective story in figuring out what all the hints dropped by the author meant. It honestly didn't take much, there's enough dropped to basically put the puzzle together fairly quickly, but I was led along the way in how the characters would react when they figured it out, and what would happen as a result. This was where I was primarily let down, and was also one of my biggest annoyances about the book: none of the players in this story felt like they had emotions at all about what they were revealing along the way. No curiosity, no “huh, that's weird”, no real drive to learn more. Mild ending feeling spoilers (no details): even when the author finally gets around to “the big reveal” far later in the book than felt necessary, the characters accepted it, talked about it briefly, and then the book ends. It felt incredibly anticlimactic.

It's a fine book and I can see why people rated it how they did, but ultimately it felt like a miss to me. Certainly interesting discussion questions are raised, but there's so much detachment felt by the main characters that it's hard for me as a reader to really get invested in questions that won't be answered or addressed.