A review by tommysyk
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

5.0

Lots of sci-fi stories have tackled the subject of mortality and what it means to be "human" (look no further than Blade Runner, for instance), and while I'm hesitant in calling Never Let Me Go a sci-fi story (it's much more of a coming-of-age romance than anything else, with a sci-fi concept at its core), there's something quite different about it that I'm struggling to put into words. Its writing is overly simplistic, not in a dampening way but a deeply personal one, and a lot of its focus goes into a love triangle arc that's stretched out for nearly two thirds of the book. But once you start peeling the layers of the onion, it becomes much, much more than the innocent grasping-at-straws it leads you on for so long, and even more than its obvious meditation on the existence of a human soul. Suddenly, you find yourself reflecting on your own morals, and then the morals we adhere to as a society, and how uncomplicated an act it would be to briskly look away from injustice if it meant we'd take a small step away from facing our own mortality.

Then that simplicity doesn't seem quite as simple anymore.