davidaguilarrodriguez 's review for:

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

4.75

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective sad medium-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Yes

Loveable characters: Yes

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

Flaws of characters a main focus: Complicated

---

This one hit me dead on.

A restrained, quietly eerie novel that builds slowly and lands with devastating emotional and philosophical force. It’s about

clones

, yes — but more than that, it’s about humanity, inhumanity, memory, fate, and how we treat other sentient beings who feel pain, pleasure, connection, and longing.

Normally, muted prose is not my thing, but here the restraint really works. It lulls you into contemplation without sacrificing stakes in the story. The emotional ambiguity, the fog of memory, the polite avoidance of true horror, the aching but unsentimental voice of the narrator… all of it is masterful. 

Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth are beautifully rendered characters — messy, contradictory, resigned — and their complicated relationship is the anchor that keeps the story grounded in an emotional truth. The most brilliant thing this book does is root enormous ethical questions inside a small, sad, deeply human love triangle. 

As I read, I kept thinking not just about

cloning

, but about animals. Specifically, about how we already treat beings with minds and hearts and memories — as resources, as background noise, as experiments, as food, as organs to plunder. This is a novel about consciousness, moral complicity, and what we choose not to see. It forces you to ask: what do we owe to the other thinking and feeling beings in our world? 

The genius of Never Let Me Go is that it never screams. It doesn’t preach, or shock, or moralize. It just lays out a perfectly constructed, emotionally precise story and lets the powerful existential questions bloom in the background. It’s subtle. And it lingers.

I think this one will stay with me for a long time.