Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, Psychological, Lang:en
Summary
From the Booker Prize-winning author of
The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel
of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and
Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school
secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of
mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were
constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.
Now, years later, Kathy is a young woman. Ruth and Tommy
have reentered her life. And for the first time she is
beginning to look back at their shared past and understand just
what it is that makes them special–and how that gift will
shape the rest of their time together. Suspenseful, moving,
beautifully atmospheric,
Never Let Me Go is another classic by the author of
The Remains of the Day. 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
Adult/High School–The elegance of Ishiguro's prose and
the pitch-perfect voice of his narrator conspire to usher
readers convincingly into the remembered world of Hailsham, a
British boarding school for special students. The reminiscence
is told from the point of view of Kathy H., now 31, whose
evocation of the sheltered estate's sunlit rolling hills,
guardians, dormitories, and sports pavilions is imbued with
undercurrents of muted tension and foreboding that presage a
darker reality. As an adult, Kathy re-engages in lapsed
friendships with classmates Ruth and Tommy, examining the
details of their shared youth and revisiting with growing
awareness the clues and anecdotal evidence apparent to them
even as youngsters that they were different from everyone
outside. [...] Ishiguro conveys with exquisite sensitivity the
emotional texture of the threesome's relationship, their bonds
of personal loyalty that overcome fractures of trust, the
palpable boundaries of hope, and the human capacity for
forgiveness. Highly recommended for literary merit and as an
exceptional platform for the discussion of a controversial
topic.
–Lynn Nutwell, Fairfax City Regional Library, VA
Amazon.com Review
From School Library Journal
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