Never Let Me Go; by Kazuo Ishiguro

Intricate, irritating, moving, unsettling, and fascinating are some of the many words that I would use to describe this novel. The level of enjoyment that the reader will get out of Never Let Me Go depends greatly on whether or not he/she enjoys Ishiguro’s style of writing.
Never Let Me Go is narrated by 31 year old Kathy, who tells of her life in a place she calls Hailsham and her relationship with her best friends Ruth and Tommy, as well as her life and their relationship post-Hailsham. The way in which the story is told can be very hard to follow at times. There is a lot of back and forth with the narrator. If you enjoy learning about characters over long periods of time, then this book would be one to read. Ishiguro chooses to mention events, characters, etc., without an explanation before going off into a tangent, which at the moment seems unrelated to what was previously being read, only to explain pages later what the reader was waiting to learn long in the first place.
The first half of the book is very slow. The events that the narrator recounts seem insignificant. At times, I doubted whether or not there was an actual point to the novel. It isn’t until you look close, understand the vocabulary and terms Ishiguro uses, and begin to make connections that you begin to see what is going on at Hailsham and why it’s so significant. Once you make the realization, you’ll look at the book in an entirely new way.
If you can get past the difficulty of the author’s writing style and can engage yourself completely in the novel, you’ll find that it is a truly amazing story of three best friends trying to learn how to live the lives that have been forced upon them.