🚨 WARNING: Light Spoilers Ahead

Never Let Me Go is called dystopian sci-fi. It isn’t, not really. Kazuo Ishiguro uses the genre—the off-kilter institution, the slow drip of revelation—to ask something harder than what dystopia usually asks. Not how do people resist a system that owns them? But what conditions produce a person who doesn’t?

When I posted about the book, the few people who responded either hated it or wondered if they had missed something. I get the reaction. If I’d come to it differently, I might have landed there, too. Normally, I don’t spoil a book. This one is the exception. Going in blind, I think most people will end up frustrated or confused. I knew the basic plot and roughly how it ended before I started, and that shaped how I read it.

The story opens in an English boarding school where small things feel off. Required weekly medicals. Constant warnings not to injure themselves. Creativity is emphasized to an unusual degree. The children’s art becomes a kind of currency. A French-Belgian woman called Madame evaluates the children’s art and selects pieces for what the students call “the gallery.”

The story centers on three friends: Kathy, our narrator; Tommy; and Ruth. There’s a love triangle, but it’s not the center of the book. The children are clones raised to become organ donors. Kathy works for years as a “carer,” looking after donors as they progress through their donations—before becoming a donor herself.

The language is flat. The children don’t give up organs; they make “donations.” They don’t die; they “complete.” The clones aren’t for specific recipients. The children question if they are cloned from someone real, a “possible.” Ruth hears that hers was spotted working in a fancy office in Norfolk. A group of them goes to find her. It isn’t her.

Every child wants to know where they come from. These characters are no different. But for Ruth, this confirms the worst fear. That they aren't copied from anyone admirable. They're likely cloned from criminals, addicts, and the discarded, spare parts assembled from spare people.

The book is told as a memory. It’s incomplete, the way memory is. Kathy remembers some things sharply and shrugs at others. She asked a question once, accepted whatever answer she got, and moved on. The whole novel sits in that slight fog. And it has another quality, harder to pin down: the children have been raised so thoroughly to accept their fate that even the questioning that does happen stays small. Internal. Private. There is no uprising. They don’t organize.

Ishiguro explores this question through love and creativity. The students were told the art mattered, though they didn’t know why. Tommy, who couldn't make art, got teased for it and lectured by teachers. Then one of them, Miss Lucy, told him it was fine. He didn't need to be creative. He should just be himself.

On a first read, it sounds like kindness. It isn’t. Miss Lucy accepts the purpose of the children. Telling Tommy his art doesn't matter is another way of telling him that nothing he does will change what happens to him, delivered as comfort.

Miss Lucy eventually breaks. She starts telling the children the truth, believing that they need to understand what’s coming, not be sheltered from it. The other guardians push back. She’s removed.

But notice what Miss Lucy doesn’t do. She doesn’t tell them to run. She doesn’t tell them to refuse. She tells them to accept it knowingly, which is still acceptance. She thinks she’s doing right by them, but her rebellion is about how the children meet their fate, not whether they meet it. Even her rebellion serves the system. Miss Lucy gives the children just enough truth to make their compliance feel like understanding rather than ignorance.

The school is unusual within the system. When Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth meet other donors after graduating, people want to hear about Hailsham. They ask questions. They don’t talk about where they grew up. The implication sits in what they don’t say: most of these children were raised somewhere much worse. What looked like a strange, sheltered, slightly ominous boarding school was, by the standards of this world, the kind version.

I picked this book up because comfort as a tool of control is a theme I’ve been exploring. This book takes that idea to its end. Asking what it takes to strip a person of their essence. In what conditions would a human being walk willingly to their own end? Whether clones have souls is the question this world cannot afford to answer. If they do, the donations are murder. So the question is never asked. The clones stay soulless because they have to be. Because the truth is unbearable to the people whose lives depend on them.

The children are never taught to question authority, to think of themselves as individuals, or to follow an instinct. Even Miss Lucy tells them to accept their fate, never to challenge it. She is accepting the sacrifice of these children for the benefit of others, of “real people.” The instincts that the rest of us cultivate—ask questions, be different, push back—are absent here by design.

So the question becomes: is the compliance the product of how they were raised or of what they are? When a person is a copy, does something essential become diluted? The book doesn't answer. It doesn't need to. It just shows you children with small private conflicts and no fight against the system that owns them. They’re told they have a purpose. They’re given no skills for any life outside that purpose. And so they do as they’re told. The donations are what their lives are for, and, eventually, they are what give their lives shape.

Even Kathy carries a quiet pride in being a good carer, her donors don’t get too agitated; they don’t struggle the way she’s seen others struggle. As her time as a carer ends, she’s almost looking forward to begin her own donations.

The other major thread is whether love can save them, or at least buy them time. A rumor circulates that couples who can prove they're truly in love can defer their donations. Tommy and Kathy chase that hope. They get an answer. It isn't the one they want. They all complete. Some on the first donation, some after four. Nobody runs, there is no breakout, no wheelchairs rolling through the gates. Everybody donates. Everybody completes.

That's the source of most of the frustration with this book. Why didn't they fight? Why didn't they refuse the first appointment? Wrong question. It's the question the book wants you to sit with, not answer. This isn't a thriller about clones escaping their fate. It's about how escape never crosses their mind.

This book is a thinker. Slow and introspective, with no big reveal. If you go in expecting dystopian sci-fi, you'll be disappointed. If you go in expecting a meditation on what makes a person a person—and what can be done to a person to make them stop asking—you'll get a lot from it.

Have you read Never Let Me Go? Did you hate it? Did I convince you to reread it?

Up next: My Summer Reading List

This summer, I’m getting it back.

For accountability and a little public pressure, I’m starting a new newsletter: The Bookie. I’ll share my summer reading journey here, and if it sticks, it keeps going past Labor Day.

You’ll get my unfiltered thoughts and reviews, but I want this to be more than that. Margin notes. Favorite quotes. The “this book made me think” moments. Whatever else feels worth sharing as I go.

Below is the plan. An accountability contract with myself (and now with you).

The Plan

• Physical book in my purse, every time I leave the house. Phone stays in the bag.

• Book before TV in the evenings.

• 6 books between May and August. 250+ pages each.

• I’ll log every book on Fable so you can follow along if you like.

• I’ll track reading time with Bookly and share the stats.

Alright, I am going to start us off with a review of my most recent read, which will not count toward my summer book count, but I have to talk about it. Gauging from my Instagram responses, you all might not like what I have to say.

🚨 WARNING: Light Spoilers Ahead

The Secret History of Pretty in Pink

I finished The Secret History recently. Donna Tartt. 559 pages, including the epilogue. And these are my immediate, unfiltered thoughts.

I don’t get the hype.

The book is well written at the sentence level. I’ll give Tartt that. But it’s a long book that goes on forever and doesn’t really pick up until almost page 300. That is a lot of investment to ask of a reader, and the payoff doesn’t justify the commitment. I love a slow burn, but this is closer to a long warm-up to a lukewarm bath.

All I See Is McKee

This book has had a second wind on “book tok.” The kids are loving it, but it’s because they do not have the memory to see what I see. The book was published in 1992. Tartt would have been 23 when Pretty in Pink came out. And it shows. The whole cast of pretentious upper-class kids posing as intellectuals, wanting to be more grown-up than they actually are. The image that kept coming to mind was Steff McKee, the James Spader character. Arrogant rich kid walking around running his fingers through his hair, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, bathrobe. That energy is in virtually every character in this book, especially Henry, whom Richard is obsessed with.

Honestly? Richard is the Molly Ringwald character. The outsider pulled into a world he doesn’t belong in and won’t stop romanticizing. Henry is a morph: Andrew McCarthy’s Blaine for the love-interest fixation, James Spader’s Steff for the arrogance. Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And it tells you something that the most vivid mental image I had after 559 pages was a 1986 teen movie.

It almost reads like fan fiction of the quintessential late-’80s, early-’90s rich kid. Undersupervised, too much money, never learned anything, coasting through life and playing adult.

Minutiae Is Not Atmosphere

One of the things that genuinely distracted me was Tartt’s habit of listing. She uses inventory and adjectives where I think she means to be building atmosphere, and it doesn’t work for me. She itemizes a room the way I itemize my grocery list.

Exhibit A:

Our feet crunched on the gravel. Charles smoked a cigarette and drank his soda through a red and white striped straw. Black flies winded around our ears. “So, you and Henry had an argument,” I said, just for something to say.

Who cares that the straw is red and white? What do the flies add? We already know they are outside. You can build atmosphere without listing the contents of a scene. This pattern shows up everywhere. The dinner Bunny cons Richard into is a list of items on the table dressed up as chaos.

And then there’s the hair-touching. Francis, Henry, constantly running their fingers through their moppy hair as a stand-in for a feeling. It became a tic I started counting. That’s a writing tell, not character development.

Threads That Go Nowhere

The book sets up mysteries that it never pays off.

The Argentina trip, built up like ominous foreshadowing, then they just don’t go and show up at school the next day as if nothing had happened. The hinted threat of Henry may be killing Charles, built up and built up, only to be redirected toward an ending that doesn’t come from any of it. Julian, as the shadowy puppeteer of these students, was heavily implied but never delivered on. He stays a flat, pretentious professor the kids worship for reasons the book never actually demonstrates.

And the Camilla/Henry pairing. The book hints at something incestuous between Charles and Camilla. That’s the foreshadowed dynamic. And then out of nowhere, Camilla shacks up with Henry. There was no buildup to that. Look, I am not stanning an incestuous relationship, not at all, but she took it there, never building toward Camilla and Henry. Which I might have bought if Tartt hinted at some weird love triangle. It’s almost like she thought about it, but couldn’t pull the trigger.

A Murder Without Weight

The Bacchanal and the farmer’s death are what propel the entire novel. They’re the catalyst for the plot. By the time I finished reading it, my only thought was, meh. Who knows, maybe I have watched too much true crime.

These kids don’t wrestle with what they did. They barely give it a second thought. The farmer is a non-person to them. Bunny becomes a non-person the moment he’s inconvenient and leans into blackmail. He wasn’t liked to begin with; they all viewed themselves as above Bunny. Charles spirals, okay, but he’s spiraling because he’s afraid of Henry or of getting caught, not because he killed a man. If these kids were morally complex characters, there would be some struggle. There is none.

The big reveal of the farmer’s murder reads as anticlimactic. We get more details later, but they’re mentioned passively. And they excuse it as a byproduct of the Bacchanal. Nobody is significantly affected. It’s an indifferent act of violence that lacks any genuine moral or philosophical exploration by the characters and, therefore, the author.

I am aware of the defensive arguments; I saw them online. They say the moral vacancy is the point, that the book is indicting these kids for worshipping the aesthetic of meaning without earning it.

Um, I don’t buy it.

They weren’t worshipping an aesthetic. They were performing an image of being above their peers, intellectually and otherwise. That’s simply pretentiousness. The only one with anything resembling real intellectual seriousness is Henry. Which is also revealed to be a performance the second you ask who it’s for. Julian. The dead-father thing. He’s performing for approval from a selfish, self-involved professor.

What these kids share is contempt for anyone they see as below them. The farmer. Bunny. They’re not struggling with the moral weight of what they did because the people they killed weren’t fully human to them in the first place. That’s not moral complexity, it’s moral vacancy. And if Tartt were actually indicting it, it would register at some point in this book. It never does.

The prose lingers on the cigarettes, the whiskey, brands, the Greek, and the country houses like it’s seduced by the same thing the characters are.

Vessels, Not Characters

Richard is passive to the point of annoyance. There are obvious questions in front of him, but he never opens his mouth. I find this so irritating as a reader. There are moments when a single direct question would resolve a thread, and he just doesn’t ask it. Same with the convenient piece of paper about the Argentina trip. It’s set up like a clue. We are about to start a new adventure, and then nothing.

Bunny is loud and grating, and the most developed character. I probably feel I know him best, but no sympathy has been cultivated for him. He was inconvenienced when he was alive, and he remains that way in death. Not even his family elicits sympathy. Francis exists. He would be the required DEI character, you know, because he is gay. That is the most interesting thing about him. Camilla barely registers as a person before she’s suddenly Richard’s love obsession. And Henry, the character with the most page time, ends in a way that doesn’t track with the person I spent 500 pages with. The book doesn’t build to it.

These aren’t morally complex characters. They’re pretentious vessels moving through a plot in a bathrobe. With a cigarette. And a whiskey.

Names Without Engagement

The book seeks to project an intellectualism through Dante, Tolstoy, and the Greeks. It wants credit for borrowing the weight of those writers. Unfortunately, they are dressed up like a snobby Rat Pack. Name-dropping isn’t engagement. The flattery of the reader (you’re smart enough to be reading this) is doing a lot of heavy lifting that the actual content doesn’t support.

The Verdict

I closed the book dissatisfied. No connection to anyone, a meandering middle, a weak payoff. Lush language, real talent at the sentence level, sure. But 559 pages of polished prose don’t earn the time when the plot is underdeveloped, the characters are stereotypes, and the moral stakes evaporate.

This book could be half the length and probably more interesting. The plot is fine. It’s underdeveloped, not uninteresting. And the fact that all I could visualize were the pretentious douchebags from Pretty in Pink is, fine, partly my own fault. But also partly not, because the book reads like fan fiction of that exact archetype.

Even Richard, the one character who came in from outside and could have learned something, ends up nostalgic for his time in college. Which is genuinely disturbing when you think about it. You killed a dude.

That’s my review. ⭐️⭐️⭐️ & 1/2

Have you read The Secret History? What did you think of the book and my review? Be honest but be nice. ;)

Up next: Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro