So... I don't really know what to say about this one to be honest. I finished the book this evening and sort of shrugged before skimming over my to-read pile to pick what I should read next.

In a week, I blew way past the reading schedule my class has for this book. Along with Frankenstein (which I didn't care enough about to leave a proper commentary for), Never Let Me Go and Oryx and Crake are also on my reading list for my English class based on the theme of making humans in science fiction. The class is interesting enough, and if it wasn't for the class I probably would have never gotten around to reading this. The class discussions we've had in the past few days and related articles we've read really put the book into perspective, but it still doesn't move me.

Never Let Me Go is told in the first person through Kathy, a character who's voice no matter how I try to accept, irks me to no end. In the book there are three main characters throughout all three parts: Ruth, Kathy, and Tommy. Ruth desperately needs to be the centre of attention, to the point where she makes up eccentric lies and throws her "friends" under the bus; Tommy has unresolved anger issues and can't put his few definable feelings into words or art; and Kathy has this like need to always do the correct thing, even if it means she has to calculate her entire life and place herself on the back burner. The story hops around a lot, but it's still followable. If Ishiguro wanted to really put the reader into a dreaded conversation with Kathy, he really does go about it well. Out of the entire twenty-three chapter novel, I only really enjoyed the twenty-first and twenty-second. When I finally got to them, it seemed like a relief. Maybe it's because of the class that I was taking that I knew what kind of discussion Kathy and her guardians were going to end up having, but it did feel like the story had a lot of fluff before getting to the point.

We'll be tying the book in with the movie The Island, which is a really good fit. I don't know if I'll ever see the film based off of Ishiguro's book, but the trailer does look quite nice.

Labels: kazuo ishiguro, never let me go, school