Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it. Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is. Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.
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Very interesting to read. Sad, but not tear-jerking. Not at all what I expected from the story, but not jaw-dropping, either. Glad I read it.
04/5
i really enjoyed the writing and storyline of this book! where it was lacking for me is, i think, my expectations of it being focused on being dystopian when in reality that was such a small aspect of the book. ultimately, this book is about 3 friends growing up together with a side plot of dystopian. So if you go into it knowing it’s mostly a coming-of-age story rather than a dystopian, you should enjoy it!
0This is one of those books that I had looked at and never opened but had constantly been on the back of my mind as one I should pick up... I'm so glad I opened it on my Kindle this week because I got so lost in Hailsham and the dystopic England in its pages that I don't really remember the hours I spent reading it. They might as well have been five minutes.
Set in a dystopic future where humans are cloned and raised for the sole purpose of donating their vital organs to those that had them created. What ensues is a wildly ordinary tale made extraordinary by circumstance in the novel and heartbreaking and beautiful and tragic and funny and honest... This book will take you through all the stages we go through when we make friends, when we lose friends, when we fall in and out of love, how awkward friendships can be, how honesty fails sometimes and deception can poison the well forever...
If you're looking for a world to get lost in, choose this novel. You won't regret it.
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