Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

The book we read as part of our teachers professional development sequence on poverty said that the way most teachers tell a story is linearly - the story begins with setting and characters are introduced, plot is developed to a climax, and then there is a resolution. The way a lot of the children we are teaching tell a story is to reach the greatest emotional impact and involve the audience the most - starting off with the climax and then parsing the details out in small tidbits later, requiring the listener to affirm and demonstrate listening.

I started to listen to my students more as they told stories.

The way they told stories would dizzy me. Starting at the climax of whatever story a student would tell would utterly confuse me. The circling round and round to the same problem, over and over again. The unfinished sentences and necessary and important details would come out long after the original description needed clarifying

I finally started to know why they couldn't do math problems. They never understood the POINT. What was the end result? Fuck all these intermediary steps - they wanted to know the end right away! That was how they told stories.

I started to show a complete problem from the very beginning, before they had to do any work, and then list the steps to each type of problem on the board. Damn it, I was going to teach them to think linearly if it killed me. And it practically did.

This book here, this Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, it does that thing - that starting in the middle of the fucking story. It's overall in chronological order from when the narrator was young to early adulthood to adulthood, but within each of those three sections, it's in medias res all the way. He starts by giving away the ending and then eventually winding his way to an explanation. And it...drove me insane.

I'm also enjoy a plot driven book and this book...is not so much with the rapidly developing plot.

So I pretty much hated this book. Rarely have I disliked a book so much that I write an entire post devoted to why I hate it.

But I still can't not recommend it. Its writing is quite good. The premise is...not awful. The characters are...not entirely unforgettable.

I just can't wrap my head around the sloppiness of giving away the the ending. You can call it foreshadowing if you will (and my eighth grade English teacher did), but I call it ruining the ending and the making me want to hurl the book against the wall.

Read this at your own peril. You've been warned.