Reviews with content warning for Bullying - Never Let Me Go

❤️ 🧡 💛 💚 💙 💜 my about / byf / CW info carrd 💜 💙 💚 💛 🧡 ❤️

It's very melancholy, not v hard into the scifi / medical aspects, irritatingly monologue prone, quite dreamy. Can get boring.
In a word, this book can be described as staid. Not necessarily in a bad way. It's almost autobiographical. No rating as I didn't connect with the book, but it's well written and would be appreciated by others.

content warnings:
minor emetophobia, NSFW, death, child death, pedophilia, child abuse,

medium eugenics, peer abuse / bullying, sexual content, body horror, gore, medical content, medical abuse,

Content Warnings

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dark mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

NEVER LET ME GO is a quiet and circuitous reminiscence on a life lived which slowly unfurls into descriptions of an inescapable dystopian nightmare which proceeds at the ambling pace of ordinary existence, ending with a whimper.

As a dystopia it’s quiet, the disturbing details coming in drips and drabs with a sense that Kathy as a narrator assumes the reader knows the system already and so is only paying attention to find out what her place was in it, not to learn what it is altogether. The narrative style meanders in time in order to be mostly clear in thought. It’s not linear, sometimes frustratingly so, but it was usually easy for me to follow because each bit of information is told based on its relevance to some other piece of the past. It has the disconnected quality of a long reminiscence while being generally understandable.

Several of the characters were pretty unlikeable. I enjoy sometimes reading something where I just hate a main character so I had a good time, but Ruth is a consistently unpleasant person for much of the book, and I wish Tommy had room to be more his own person. That said, in a story about how none of them get to be their own people in a larger sense it works really well, but if you're irritated by it early on you should know it doesn't really get better.

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