A Bookish Girl
I'd been meaning to read this for years. Decades, maybe? I was very engrossed at the beginning. I love stories where we just find ourselves in a world that functions differently from ours, but the author/narrator assumes that we already know as much as they do, so we have to figure things out from little clues and throwaway comments. So the first third of the book was really interesting in that respect. Around the middle, though, when the pacing never changed, and things just continued being unexplained, I got a bit weary of it. Then towards the end my interest returned a bit... but there is never any climax or change of pace or anything like that. It's a quiet book, just one person's reflections on her life, and there's no big reveal or plot twist or anything like that. I wish we had found out a bit more about certain things, especially how the donations worked. But Ishiguro was obviously going for more of a “slice of life” story (based on very unusual lives which were normal for the people living them).
Novellas don't really work for me. They just feel too rushed. This one was cute, but I wasn't the fan of the way it began with the couple getting together, and then going back in time to show how they got to that point. Because even though it's a romance novel, and we KNOW the two leads are obviously going to get together, taking away the mystery of when and how it happens kind of made it fall flat.
This one didn't quite work for me. I didn't feel the magic I did with her early books, especially Anatomical Shape of a Heart (aka Night Owls) and the glorious Alex Approximately. A half star rating of 2.5 would probably be accurate, but I've rounded up because this is definitely not as bad as some of the books I've given 2 stars to! But it hovers somewhere between “it was okay” and “I liked it”.
This was a cute story, but the writing was... not great. Not like 50 Shades level bad, but enough that it really irritated me. Things like “decisions he had taken”. You don't take decisions, you MAKE decisions. Or at one point when the two leads are snuggled up together, the main character says “a grunt fell into my neck”. What? And at least three times when the love interest moved towards her suddenly, she says “he ate the distance between us”. Wtf?? Add to that a load of grammatical errors (like using “it's” when it should have been “is”) and the result is 2/5 stars from me. It would have been 3 if the writing had matched the story. So disappointing.
Although I do have to add that the sex scenes were awkward AF and really weird and sudden.
