Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Let me preface this review by saying this book is not nearly as girly as it sounds from the title.

That being said, I do have to admit that this book is one of the three books that have ever made me cry in my life.

Well, four-- I was about eight years old and was reading this book that was waaaayyyy too old for me and I lost it when the dad murdered the baby sitter. I don't count that one, though, because I never finished it. And because I didn't cry because I was attached to the characters, I cried because I was afraid for my life.

The other two are the 6th and 7th Harry Potters.

This book struck a chord. I'm starting to get a little teary just thinking about it.

The story follows 3 students through boarding school and into their lives after. They grow up with the vague knowledge that they're very special, very lucky, and that they're human clones bred and raised to one day donate their organs to "normal" citizens until they die.

Their life-spans are half to a third as long as normal citizens so we watch as Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy dream of and struggle to have normal lives, make sense of their past, and try to put off their fates for as long as they can.

I think one of the reasons this book got to me so much was the powerlessness of the characters. The idea of being unable to do anything about your destiny, about your life...and knowing you're essentially going to be tortured to death at a young age; what a horrible fate. I feel a little claustrophobic just writing it.

There's no shortage of dramatic tension with this knowledge over your head while you read, but Ishiguro employs a writing technique that does, for me, diffuse the tension of the individual situations a bit-- Kathy, as the narrator, tells you what's going to happen, but then in order for that to make sense she has to explain something that happened weeks or months or years earlier. This makes me crazy, but I admit that I can't think of a better way to do it for this particular story.

Overall, there's something incredibly engaging about the book: I couldn't put it down. Watching Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy unraveling the secrets surrounding them, their love for each other in all its forms, and watching them deal with the heartbreaking truths is addictive.

4 Stars out of 5