October book study: Never Let Me Go

I have to confess I'm struggling. I'm about 70 pages in, and it feels like he's still setting up for a story that is to come. It feels like a giant info dump. There is way too much "But first let me explain what I mean by..." Get to the story, already.

My interest is up by wondering what is meant by donation, what the children are being trained for, and how all this fits together. I have my suspicions, but he's taking so long to move the story along.

Gabby - interesting about your non-sci-fi friend. I'm much more of a contemporary fan that sf/f. As of about page 80, I don't see anything sci-fi about it. As mentioned, this book is barely holding my interest.

What I do like is we are getting hints about what's going on (mysterious donations, a shady gallery where stuff goes, the kids being trained for "something," and then learning they are not able to have children). If not for these hints I would have stopped reading 40 pages ago. I said above this feels very info-dumpy (I'm on page 80 or so and I'm waiting for the story to start in earnest), and if you were going to do an infodump putting little clues to later in the book would be one way to do it.

I can't help but project where I think the book is going, and the political/social implications are obvious. If it is going where I think it is, I will be interested in seeing how it is handled, and if not I'm hoping I'll be surprised.

Sai - Yep, I laugh too at the cliffhangers. It's like he expects us to gasp and hold our hand to our mouths "What do you mean Miss Emily explained everything? Oh my, I must keep reading!" What also drives me nuts is the "But first let me explain about the 'tokens.' " This constant stopping to explain stuff is why I think it's so info-dumpy.

Sorry folks, I'm bailing out on this one. I'm closing the book and reading something else. That's probably no surprise given my posts above.

Here are my reasons: The only thing holding my interest was the mystery of what the children were being trained for, but that was explained on page 80 or so. Okay, so the kids are being reared to be carers for organ donors and then will be organ donors themselves. Once that was revealed, the plot didn't develop into anything that made me wonder what was going to happen next. The main character had no problem with this fate, so she had no motivation to move the story along herself. In fact, there seemed to be no central conflict to the story at all. The main character was passive in a world without conflict. Ho-hum. If there were hints to something building then I missed them entirely.

I also have to confess to some sour grapes. Ishigoru did a lot of things I try hard to avoid in my own writing: scene descriptions that don't add anything but words, subplots and character conflicts that don't go anywhere, and pages at a time without dialog. I cut a lot of things I liked in my book to reduce word count, and here he is flaunting them in my face . I know I have a lot to learn about writing, and why these things work in this book and not in mine is one of the things I haven't learned yet. Alternatively, the lesson is "if I don't want to write like that, then don't worry about how he writes."

Either way, this was a great exercise for me and thanks for the opportunity! I'm doing NaNo next month, but I'll probably do another book study in the future.