REVIEW: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

You know that gut feeling you get when you are left out of someone's inside joke? That is what you feel the entire way throughout this book. The story is about a group of students at a private boarding school in England in the 90s. They take classes, work on various art projects and attend something called "sales" that never gets fully explained. Seemingly they are normal students, even though their teachers (whom they refer to as "guardians") continually call them "special". It's not until 200 pages later that their uniqueness gets revealed. They all are working towards "donations", which is some kind of medical procedure, but again the details on it are sparse. The sporadic doling out of details and information is the most frustrating part of this book. Nothing gets fully (or sometimes even partially) explained. There's a lame attempt at a love story, but even that seems stale and unengaging. You can see where Ishiguro was going with the story, but he never quite made it there and the piecemeal writing left me with junior high flashbacks of sitting alone at the lunchtable. There are very few books I regret buying, but this is certainly one of them. It's definitely going in the pile for Bookins