Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
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Book Summary Information
Author: Kazuo IshiguroReader: Rosalyn Landor
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Audiobook, Unabridged
Published: 2005-04-12
ISBN: 0739317989
Publisher: Random House Audio
Book Reviews of Never Let Me Go
Book Review: Excellent book and audiobook
Summary: 5 Stars
I mostly pick up this book, because I just love reading the book first then watching the movie (although it doesn't always happen in that order). Anywa, I kind of had an idea of what the book was about since I had read a couple of reviews for the movie. I can say reading the reviews kind of ruined the book a bit for me, but I tried to ignore it. The book is told from Kathy's point of view, as she remembers her time at Hailsham and her friends there, Tommy and Ruth, who become a couple during their adolescent years. And you can already see the triangle forming, don't you? Children at Halsham are special, and have a purpose in their lives that also makes their life span very short. I won't say what it is because that was one of the things that I got spoiled on movie reviews and I wished I hadn't.
I think this book is great for book clubs, it will , for sure, generate discussion. Not only is the characters motivations, such a Ruth's, to be discussed, but also Hailshams policy on the children. Whether should the children know why they are in Hailsham or not, and even going beyond the book and asking whether is fair to use these children in this manner. I found the Ruth character very unlikeable, even when she does have a redeeming gesture toward the end of the story. Still, I could understand her insecurity and her motivations for trying to keep Tommy and Kathy apart, but mostly I wondered why both Tommy and Kathy allowed themselves to be bullied by Ruth. Also, there wasn't a point where I felt I was missing out on other character's motivations or stories, even when the book is told from Kathy's point of view the author does a great job at describing their motivations. There was a lot of sex in this book though, not graphic just a lot of talk and mentions of it.
Audiobook Review: Rosalyn, the narrator, has a gorgeous accent. English isn't my firth language, so sometimes I have trouble with accents sometimes but this wasn't the case with Never Let Me Go. She is also very good at voicing different characters like Tommy, Miss Emily, and others. As well, her pacing is very good.
Summary of Never Let Me Go
From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.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.
From the Hardcover edition.
All children should believe they are special. But the students of Hailsham, an elite school in the English countryside, are so special that visitors shun them, and only by rumor and the occasional fleeting remark by a teacher do they discover their unconventional origins and strange destiny. Kazuo Ishiguro's sixth novel, Never Let Me Go, is a masterpiece of indirection. Like the students of Hailsham, readers are "told but not told" what is going on and should be allowed to discover the secrets of Hailsham and the truth about these children on their own.
Offsetting the bizarreness of these revelations is the placid, measured voice of the narrator, Kathy H., a 31-year-old Hailsham alumna who, at the close of the 1990s, is consciously ending one phase of her life and beginning another. She is in a reflective mood, and recounts not only her childhood memories, but her quest in adulthood to find out more about Hailsham and the idealistic women who ran it. Although often poignant, Kathy's matter-of-fact narration blunts the sharper emotional effects you might expect in a novel that deals with illness, self-sacrifice, and the severe restriction of personal freedoms. As in Ishiguro's best-known work, The Remains of the Day, only after closing the book do you absorb the magnitude of what his characters endure. --Regina Marler
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