I did as requested and didn't read any of the reviews before tackling this book.
I liked the idea, of a tranquil boarding school with strange rituals and secrets hiding its true purpose.

The writing itself was a bit tough going, kind of repetitive in certain instances
i.e. "this reminds me of the time I was by the oak tree talking to Ruth"....."This is why the conversation by the oak tree was so important"...."anyway let me tell you about the story by the oak tree." See - pretty tedious.

But I pushed on because I was really hoping all these hints would lead to some big reveal or some great twist. But unfortunately I found there was no great surprise, I'd more or less worked out what the schools purpose was and I found myself finishing the book with no real satisfaction.

It was a great concept, but I feel so much more could have been done with it, the entire story just fell a bit flat for me. This might be because I'd had such high hopes to begin with - note to self never go into a book with too much expectation as it just makes the disappointment worse.

I might still try another of Ishiguro's books though just to see if it’s universal or just this particular novel.

I listened to the audiobook of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. It was narrated by Rosalyn Landon who did an outstanding job of reading this book. Never Let Me Go was Kazuo Ishiguro’s sixth book. Although I enjoyed The Remains of the Day a bit more than this book, I still felt that this book was beautifully written and very thought provoking. My favorite book, though, was Klara and the Sun. Never Let Me Go was character driven with a very unusual and complex plot. There was a darkness to this book. I found it to be quite engrossing but its secrets and discoveries were revealed quite slowly throughout the course of the book. It touched upon my emotions in a variety of ways. Sometimes I was justifiably horrified by what had been revealed and at other times I felt good for what the characters were finally able to understand and accept. Never Let Me Go focused on the innocence and trust of young children, the knowledge young adults acquired and accepted and the acceptance and understanding of loss in later years of life.

Once there was a special private school called Halisham that was located in the English countryside. The children who attended Halisham were always told that they were special. They were protected and sheltered from the outside world. There were very specific rules that the children had to follow and obey.

Kathy H. was the protagonist and narrator of this book. She had been a student at Halisham but was now an alumni and thirty-one years old and a carer. Throughout the book, Kathy H., recounted her childhood memories and experiences at Halisham and how she only wanted to discover everything she could about the school and the people who ran it. Kathy H. finally succeeded in putting the pieces of the puzzle together about the place and school where she spent her entire childhood. The only thing was, that by the time she did it, it was almost too late to do anything about it. She discovered that all the rules and information that were passed down to the students by those in charge of the school had been lies. The children that attended Halisham had accepted and believed everything that they had been told. Perhaps the most important discovery Kathy H. made, though, was that Tommy, one of her friends during her years at Halisham, had actually always been her true love. Even though Kathy H. discovered this and finally acted upon this, it had been camouflaged for the longest time in the love triangle between Tommy, Ruth and herself.

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro was about the controversial act of cloning, the donation of human organs in a most unconventional way and love. It was about how certain behaviors could be justified for the greater good of mankind and advances in science. Never Let Me Go explored how certain people just accepted their fate and did not protest about how they were treated even when they were taken advantage of or treated unjustly. Kazuo Ishiguro has an exceptional way of writing about controversial subjects and he has a way of giving his readers a look into how these things might look in the future. I enjoyed reading this book and would recommend it very highly.

What fresh hell is this??
What is this salty discharge leaking from my eyes??

And... there's a movie? I will never watch it. Ever. I will give up my Netflix account, break my tv, and move out to Amish country to avoid it.



Oh, thank God I don't work! Dodged that bullet!

I read this book when it was first released and really loved it. I haven't finished an Ishiguro novel in years so it was really a delight to come back to it. I had forgotten basically everything except the basic premise of the book and I was so utterly wrapped up in it: his delicate prose, his eccentric narrator, the sadness that permeates the book but never seems to be fully felt. Ishiguro is, of course, a master of deep yet restrained emotion, but I had forgotten it in this book. I believe that when this book got relatively popular that my memory filled in the gaps I couldn't remember from my experience with it with assumptions about what it must be like. And of course it isn't like that at all.

Read #3 Update: I can't say I recommend reading this book while the world is burning down. Instead of it feeling sad, as it did in my prior two reads, I found that the book became not about the kind of nostalgia I'd read in it earlier but about futility. A futility that Kathy doesn't even realize. A futility and passivity that she has taken on to survive and oh boy, thinking about the way your brain shuts down to get through horrifying things, that's a lot to take on in our current moment.

This book is on my all,time top ten list. It left my heart broken and my mind racing. I actually assigned it to my graduate students because I really needed to talk to so,embody about it.

Honestly, I'm surprised so many of my friends rated Never Let Me Go so highly. I didn't hate it per se, but there was nothing about it I liked, and I found it lacking in quite a few ways.

CHARACTERS. There are 3 main characters:

1) Ruth: vain, selfish, "mean-girl" type of person. She's constantly lying and pretending to make herself look better than everyone around. She's belittling and humiliating everyone, including her boyfriend and best friend.

2) Kathy: Ruth's best friend. Basically, she takes all of Ruth's shit without a peep and also enables her to be a jerk to the rest of the world. She's observant, often knowing Ruth's motives and seeing stuff coming. But she's either cowardly or insincere enough to pretend everything is fine and let things slide.

3) Tommy: Ruth's boyfriend. A kind-hearted lad, though not the sharpest tool in the shed. Honestly, I liked him a lot. But both Kathy and Ruth made fun of him and were mean to him, and he took that so meekly it dismayed me.

So most of the book Ruth was being a jerk and everyone placated her instead of standing up to her. I hated Ruth and hated that she was the only character with any agency. Kathy and Tommy were just reacting or non-reacting to whatever Ruth did.

PLOT. For the first half of the book, it's all just 10-year-olds talking about their pencil cases. I could barely tell it was supposed to be a sci-fi dystopia. It could have been regular fiction about middle-graders in a boarding school. It was boring. And since I wasn't into the main character, it was also vaguely unpleasant.

In the second half of the book, things start to get dramatic. But the world-building is so weak, the whole thing falls apart, so I couldn't take the drama seriously and remained unmoved. It's not the kind of book that bets on a riveting plot. Even in the dramatic part very little happened. As for the "twist" - I guessed it, so nothing surprised me.

(spoilers ahead)

WORLD-BUILDING. Doesn't stand any scrutiny. So in this world, clones are being created for organ-harvesting. This enabled medicine to take a leap and most diseases are a thing of the past. It felt like Kazuo Ishiguro was purposefully vague and kept the focus off of the particulars to avoid the questions that he had no good answer for.

1) The organs are harvested from these clones one by one. Between the operations, there are long periods of recovery. So the process takes years until the clone doesn't stand the last operation. This creates a good dramatic effect: the doom and inevitability of death, slow decline of strength and fading away, etc. But if you think about it, it just makes no sense.

Why wouldn't they take the adult clone and just harvest all organs at once, while they're healthy? There's obviously enough demand for the organs. Clones are taught to look after their health because they need to be good donors. But you know what impacts the health of organs? Not having other vital organs! It's laughable and defeats the whole purpose to harvest organs this way. Not to mention it's slow and takes a lot of labor and medicine to facilitate those recoveries.

It's like having cow farms where stakes are carved from live cows piece by piece, then cows are treated to recover after each operation. Just doesn't work like that.

2) So clones are created, kept in a facility (like a school or a farm) until they're adults. Then for a few years, they're let out into the world to live and do nothing. No one patrols or monitors them. They can't work. They are not required to do anything. When they volunteer, they become nurses to other clones and eventually become organ donors themselves.

It doesn't make sense to give them these years of freedom. Why does it happen at all? So this world is cruel enough to raise clones in inhumane conditions and butcher them, but doesn't make use of these years of purposeless life they have? I bet they would have been used as slave labor during those years.

3) All of the clones know what's coming, how their life will end. But no one tries to escape, blend in, there's no resistance or even dissent. They just roll with it. I find that hard to believe.

4) Why are nurses assigned to patients all around the country and are forced to travel every day, when the patients are kept withing giant centralized hospitals?

ROMANCE. We're supposed to cry at the tragic fate of star-crossed lovers - Kathy and Tommy. But Kathy vaguely despises Tommy and he's not that into her either.

They believed for a while being in love could give them a reprieve from organ harvesting, and I totally see how former friends would start a relationship just trying to save themselves and to care for someone they know for years. Their relationship felt more like 2 people who wanted companionship, felt close because of shared history, and decided they were ok with each other as partners to try and apply for the reprieve.

Overall, what made the book tragic was that innocent people were slowly murdered, and Kathy watched her friend/lover suffer and slowly die. But they had that relationship in the first place because of the years of idleness they were given for no reason. And the abundant suffering and slow decline happened because of the absurd notion organs would get harvested one by one. So I just couldn't take it seriously! If the book made any sense, none of this would have happened!

WRITING. Was pretty good I think. The author did a good job creating those messy, unpleasant, complicated relationships and wrote about the emotional tension in an insightful way. Never Let Me Go was just not a good book, but I'll read more from Kazuo Ishiguro.

2 ½ stars. I’m kicking myself for going into this expecting a fast-paced novel I’d rocket through. Because this book may be post-apocalyptic and all depending on The Twist [which comes like a third of the way through, by the way] but it is certainly not fast-paced. Basically, even though I appreciated things about Never Let Me Go, my reading experience of this was 99% awful.

I’ve split this review into several parts, but my overarching opinion falls into one category: this book has clever ideas, but they’re not the focus. Instead, Never Let Me Go becomes a long list of memories. There is such a thing as taking show, not tell, too far - it’s when what you’re showing is beginning to bore the reader. Listen, if there are three thousand reveals or a deep character arc running through the book, we’re fine, but there are approximately two reveals and a bunch of character memories that failed to make me feel attached.

n  → the characters ←n
I want to say that I like the idea of Cathy’s character. She has been so torn down, so forced to be one thing that she has never considered being anything else or finding a different path in life. It is awful and horrifying. And yet, two things: one, she has no character voice, and two, the focus is not on developing Cathy. That is absolutely fine. Unless you’re me and literally only care about character development.

n  → the romance ←n
I’m so sorry, but this book did an utterly awful job with character chemistry. Tommy and Cath… I’m sorry, I just didn’t believe it. After spending an entire book screwing around and being just friends, they decide they’ve been in love for years because his ex girlfriend tells him they are. And then they start having sex and it is described so goddamn clinically. They clearly care about each other, but where’s the romantic side to this? I don’t even really attach to them as best friends. Neither of them are all that likable or even all that relatable.

n  → the worldbuilding ←n
A good idea, but I really don’t think this works when we see nothing about the rest of the world. I had sort of hoped the world would get expanded, we’d see the true context of normalcy juxtaposed to what the leads go through, and it just does not happen.

n  → the morality conflict ←n
It’s as if authors of 2005 think they can bring up a topic, offer zero new insight into said topic, and hope the audience thinks about the book in the future. Which, okay, I admit this strategy can work. If you’re attached to the characters enough to feel your heart break in tandem. I was not.

n  → the audio format ←n
I think, in general, listening to an audiobook of a book like this was a mistake. This is a book that required my skimreading technique. If I had read this in physical copy, I am quite confident I would have turned pages in a rush, read the whole thing in two hours skipping half the sentences, and liked it quite a bit more - I’m sure some of my thoughts would be similar, but the few reveals could’ve bumped this to a three or four at least. But by the end of this book… I was just waiting for it to end. I could no longer connect to Cathy because the book just needed to end. And that’s something to know for the future - about my reading style and about this book.

Oh well. I guess we can't win them all, right?

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I was quite surprised at this book. That it was a Booker prize candidate was a shock. It has a very been-there, done-that feel. See The Giver, by Lois Lowry, The Island, a film of recent vintage in which the subject matter is very close indeed to the underlying concept here. In a closed, prep-school-type setting, a group of young people interact with themselves and their teachers and guardians. It takes no time at all to figure out what their role is, and in fact the ease of that made me wonder if this was not originally meant to be a young adult book. It could be except for some sexuality towards the latter parts of the book. I was amazed at the overall lack of curiosity of Ishiguro’s characters. While this may reflect the extant reality of people sheepishly going along with whatever nonsense is handed out by the powers of the day, it makes for questionable fiction. One character, a queen-bee sort named Ruth, shows that flare for knowledge, mixed in with her rather massive character flaws. Kathy is our narrator, an every-girl, eager to gain the attention of the exciting Ruth, kind to the bumbling, victimized Tommy. There are a few mysteries as the characters age. What is the Gallery? Why are some teachers afraid of them? Why do these children so passively accept that they were born, cloned, so that they could be a source for organ donation? It all seems ok with them. Doesn’t anyone try to escape? The outside world is as characterless as the world of the characters’ institutional lives. Weird. I was greatly disappointed in this, by the author of Remains of the Day. So we know he has better stuff in him. This was extremely derivative, almost cribbed in some ways. Been there-done that. This is what happens when you let your grad students write your books for you. There is no need to go there or do that again here.

Never Let Me Go was an intriguing read. I found it quite similar in literary style to some of Kazuo Ishiguro's other books that I have read previously (namely The Remains of the Day and Klara and the Sun). What most captivated me as a reader was how the plot instilled in me a burning curiosity to know how the story would turn out. Most of all I wanted to confirm my suspicions and inferences about various aspects of the story that Ishiguro artfully left unclear, to draw the reader in. As the story slowly builds he gradually peels back layer after layer of this cloak of uncertainty, which triggers questions that one hopes will be answered by the end of the narrative. Another aspect that kept me engaged is Ishiguro's fluid and smooth writing, which makes it easy to get through many chapters quickly.

Admittedly, the story is a bit of a slow burner. I took me about 75-80 pages to really get into it. Moreover, I must confess I never felt fully connected to the main character Kath, nor her close-knit inner circle of friends, Ruth and Tommy. There was a level of detachment that stubbornly persisted despite getting deeper and deeper into the story. Beyond that, the story did not have any major surprising plot twists, although I was secretly hoping one would come up before the end of the book, but it never materialized. In light of these shortcomings, Never Let Me Go is not a book that will linger with me too long. I liked it more than Klara and the Sun but less than The Remains of the Day.

Overall I would recommend Never Let Me Go to anyone who enjoys books by Ishiguro and is curious to read more of his work.

"Non mi era mai passato per la mente che le nostre vite, che fino a quel momento erano rimaste tanto strettamente intrecciate fra di loro, potessero disfarsi e separarsi per una cosa come quella. [….] Se allora l'avessimo capito – chissà – forse ci saremmo tenuti più stretti l'uno all'altra.“

So glad I finished this book.

In "Never Let Me Go," a fictional story focusing on three classmates from a unique boarding school, author Kazuo Ishiguro deals with questions of loss and mortality that each of must eventually confront. As we get older, as we lose our friends and family, as the environment around us changes and things once familiar to us disappear or become unfamiliar, as we cling to our memories of how things used to be, how do we come to accept the fact that our lives are finite and attach some meaning to our limited existence? These are questions that the narrator of "Never Let Me Go," Kathy H. copes with as she recounts the disjointed memories that comprise her life. Sorting through these memories, she finds comfort in her friends and her career, eventually coming to terms with the meaning of her life and her ultimate fate.

Reflecting upon her life, Kathy devotes most of her time to thinking about her friends from Hailsham, a secluded boarding school where she grew up. Because contact with outsiders at Hailsham is limited, one of the school’s big events is the quarterly Exchange, where students are given tokens they can use to buy other students’ artwork. As this is the students’ only way of accumulating material possessions, they grow dependent on each other for their "personal treasures" and learn to value others’ work, forging unique bonds with one another. Kathy’s two best friends are Ruth, an extroverted leader at the school, and Tommy, a shy introvert who gets bullied due to his lack of creativity and inability to produce substantial work. While they depend on each other throughout their time at Hailsham, like a lot of friends they drift apart after leaving the school. Looking back at the petty argument that led to the group’s break, Kathy comments, "It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that." Kathy regrets the loss of her friends, but doesn’t do anything about it until she hears that Hailsham is closing: "[I]t started to dawn on me, I suppose, that a lot of things I’d always assumed I’d plenty of time to get around to doing, I might now have to act on pretty soon or else let them go forever." Realizing that her time is limited, Kathy decides what is important to her – what she doesn’t want to let go of – and reconnects with her old friends, Ruth and Tommy.

In addition to her friends, Kathy’s career has a special meaning in her life. Kathy begins the book by identifying herself as a "carer." Although a lot of carers "are just going through the motions waiting for the day they’re told to stop," Kathy enjoys her work, the long drives and the solitude, and she knows she is good at what she does. As a carer, she helps look after patients, assisting as they recover from "donations" and keeping them calm. She knows that she is a good carer, which is important to her: "[I]t means a lot to me, being able to do my work well." However, when she becomes Tommy’s carer, he questions the meaning of her work, asking her if she really considers her job to be important since all of her patients are going to "complete," or die, anyway. Kathy responds, "Of course, it’s important. A good carer makes a big difference." When reflecting upon her life, Kathy decides not only that her friends are important to her, but she also considers her job important, believing she makes a difference by helping others.

However, as the book begins, Kathy only has eight months left as a carer, and then she will begin the last phase of her life. Initially, Kathy does not accept this fate, hoping to get a "deferral." When the headmaster of Hailsham tells her a deferral is not possible – Kathy cannot escape her ultimate fate any more than the rest of us can – Kathy wonders what the purpose of her life has been: "Why did we do all of that work in the first place? Why train us, encourage us, make us produce all of that? If we’re just going to give donations anyway, then die, why all those lessons? Why all those books and discussions?" In fact, one of the Hailsham teachers, Miss Lucy, had made this same argument when they were children, believing it was more important that they know their ultimate fate than worry about creating artwork and developing their sense of culture: "If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you." But this is not true, the Hailsham headmaster counters, addressing Kathy and Tommy: "Look at you both now! I’m so proud to see you both. You built your lives on what we gave you. You wouldn’t be who you are today if we’d not protected you." Ultimately, Kathy comes to agree with the Hailsham approach. When she meets a patient who did not go to Hailsham, but wants to hear all about her time there so that he can replace his own memories with Kathy’s, Kathy realizes "just how lucky we’d been." Without being warned what lay ahead – as Miss Lucy had wanted – Kathy had been free to live her own life; even if it was messy, it was hers. As the novel concludes, Kathy drives to Norfolk, where she had shared her happiest memories with Tommy: "I imagined this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was standing in front of it." Instead of hanging on to those things and people she has lost, Kathy realizes that this is as far as her fantasy can go: "I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, and drove off to wherever it was I was supposed to be." Like most of us, Kathy knows her life is limited, and the best we can do is go about our everyday lives, doing what we are supposed to do. She will never let go of her memories of what she has lost, but she has accepted her fate.

Though her life hasn’t been perfect, Kathy, reflecting upon her memories, finds that her life has been meaningful – having had close friends, an important job, and an idyllic childhood, she considers herself "lucky." But has she, in fact, led a decent life? Has her life been purposeful and meaningful? These are universal questions we may all ask of ourselves – how to accept our own mortality and assign purpose to the limited life we have been given. However, these big questions of how to deal with loss and mortality also become a source of frustration and disappointment for readers because, while "Never Let Me Go" builds these questions up, it never seems to fully resolve or answer them. Fortunately, though, it does provide some clues. One of the recurring items of the book relates to a song Kathy plays as a child called "Never Let Me Go." What makes the song special for Kathy is that she assigns her own meaning to the lyrics; instead of listening to the actual words, she imagines her own version of the song: "Even at the time, I realized this couldn’t be right, that this interpretation didn’t fit with the rest of the lyrics. But that wasn’t an issue with me. The song was about what I said." At one point, when Kathy is dancing to the song in her mind, Madame, a Hailsham leader, catches her and starts sobbing. Later Madame confesses that, when she saw Kathy that day, she imagined Kathy was holding onto the old world, a "kind world," which was being replaced by a "harsh, cruel world," but now Madame realizes her interpretation was wrong: "It wasn’t really you, what you were doing." Soon after Madame catches her playing the tape, the tape is lost, her friend Ruth tries to replace it, and later, with Tommy’s help, Kathy finds another copy of the tape. The symbolic implications are clear: just as she assigns her own meaning to the song, Kathy assigns her own meaning to life. Sometimes she may be lost, sometimes others like Tommy may help her, and sometimes others like Madame may assign a different meaning to her life than she does, but Kathy is the final author of her life. While others may deem her life meaningless, she herself is content, if not happy. "Never Let Me Go" may not provide a universal answer for some of the big questions it poses about loss and mortality, but the ultimate message seems to be one of hope: as the authors of our own lives, it is up to each of us to take what we are given and make the most of it.