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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 3.5/5
Pages: 304
Started: 26 July 2024
Finished: 30 July 2024
Summary:
Kath is a carer, assigned to keep donors comfortable between donations. In fits and starts she recalls her childhood at Hailsham, a boarding school for children growing up to be donors, and her relationship with her best friend Ruth and her lover Tommy. In this delicate and introspective yet deeply eerie story about children cloned and bred to be organ donors, Ishiguro explores the very human side of futuristic medicine.
Thoughts:
The writing of this story was very beautiful. Pure, simple, and easy to follow yet not always easy to understand, I was aesthetically and intellectually immersed the entire time I was reading. The introduction of sci-fi elements was especially impressive, and the way Ishiguro slowly filled out the meat of a world where people are cloned to create organs for donation was really masterful. It was never overwhelming or confusing, and the details were given just slowly enough that you were always hoping for another hint as to what was really going on. My one issue with this book was the lack of intensity of the characters. The narration was very passive and delicate, which I found pleasant to read, but it made it difficult for me to feel connected to the characters. However, I felt this writing was so beautiful, and the world-building so clever, that I definitely intend to read more of Ishiguro's work in the future.