Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro is being adapted into a film for release in the next year or so. The film has quite a bit of critical buzz flying around it even though no one's seen it yet. The book itself was critically acclaimed as is most of Ishiguro's work apparently. One reviewer called it a "gothic tour de force." Now I'm reading this book and I'm thinking, this isn't gothic. Because when I think gothic I think horror and supernatural and evil. And I also think I should know because I took a class in Gothic and Horror Literature in college. However, the more I thought about it, the more I remembered what gothic means in literature and art: the natural order of things in the world is twisted and reversed and turned upside down. Now. By that definition, Never Let Go is indeed gothic because things in its world are majorly and sadly twisted.

Kathy H. has been a carer for the past twelve years and she's tired--she's ready to begin the next phase of her life and that's making donations. Now "donating" and "making donations" and "donors" are words that are for the most part treated rather cryptically throughout the book. It is only by reading between the lines that the reader figures out what exactly is being donated. It's never spelled out or explained thoroughly. Nor is it ever explained why donations are made or to whom or how these donations have come to pass.

As Kathy readies herself for the transition, she recalls her time at the idyllic and isolated boarding school Hailsham where the guardians constantly remind their charges how special they are, how they've been brought into this world for a specific purpose, how they're different from 'normal' people. Kathy remembers her time there specifically in the context of her friendships with Ruth and Tommy, two friends with whom she's reconnected long after all three have left Hailsham. Tommy and Kathy build a friendship and attempt to piece bits of cryptic information together to shed light on that which the guardians have told them and not told them.

Before long one realizes that life at Hailsham as well as the information shared with its students regarding their purpose and origins are all carefully orchestrated and timed and manipulated. Master of all manipulators is Ruth, who is infuriating in many ways, and who is determined to drive a permanent wedge between Kathy and Tommy, for her own inexplicable reasons. This is as much the story of a friendship, its eventual shattering, and then its rebuilding as it is about the secrets of Hailsham, the origins of its students, and that which makes them so special.

Lyrical, suspenseful, and mysterious, this is a hard book to put down. The perceptive reader will guess the dark secret at the center of Hailsham students' specialness in the first chapters all the while hoping that by book's end it will be revealed that they've guessed wrong. The ending itself is as bleak as the world depicted in Never Let Me Go--a world in which students are created for a specific purpose, only to be discarded after completion like a worn out machine.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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