Finished: Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro). Haunting, heartbreaking, well-written book! What you think is going to be a story about three children growing up together at an English boarding school, turns into a horrific reality. Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, raised and educated at Hailsham all their lives, even as infants, form a friendship and bond that carries them through ups and downs in their relationships and their lives until only one of them is still surviving at the end of the story. Ruth, the more dominant of the three, attaches herself to Tommy in their teens and they become a couple, when in reality, it's clear that Kathy and Tommy have more of a connection and have "loved" each other for a long time. What they, and we, come to find out is that the three friends, and many other children like them, are clones of other human beings....clones that were created for the sole purpose of some day being organ donors for "real" people. Their reproductive organs have been altered so that they can never have children. As they reach the age of 18, they are all taught first to be "carers"...people who will actually be caregivers to the organ donors. Then, after a few  years of being carers, they become the organ donors themselves...living in centers, going through surgeries, and eventually donating so many organs (usually by the fourth donation), that they die (in their terms, they "complete"), where everything else that can possibly be harvested is then taken. It's just an awful, haunting premise...scary. And it takes place in the 1990's!  Even the guardians who are their teachers at Hailsham are reluctant to embrace them, as they can't really think of them as real human beings. However, they do require the children to show their artistic abilities through painting and poetry so they can take proof back to the scientists and the financial backers that the clones do indeed have souls, and therefore should be treated more humanely. It still doesn't cover up the fact that children are created and raised, only to be harvested until their bodies are depleted. Meanwhile, in their young lives, they fall in love, have feelings, have experiences, just like everyone else. :-(  It makes me shudder to think something like this could really happen!