This novel is structured as a woman's reminiscences of her life, beginning in the 1990s at an elite boarding school she attended in England. The students are told that they are special and important, and that it is an extreme privilege to attend this school, but they aren't given a clear understanding of why this is or what makes the school so different from others. Throughout the first few chapters, it becomes increasingly apparent that something strange and ominous is going on. The students have close friendships with each other, but nobody ever mentions family or going home for holidays. The teachers are cagey about the nature of the situation, and some seem distressed by it, as if their hands are tied.

What is really going on is stated outright a quarter of the way into the book. The rest of the book is spent exploring that premise and looking at how the characters are shaped by and respond to their circumstances. I don't know whether the author intended to present the premise as a secret or not, but the book has been marketed as though it's a secret, and whether it's a spoiler is subjective. (Thank you all for your input on the poll!)

The premise and my thoughts on treating it as a spoiler

The premise is that the students are clones who are being raised to serve as organ donors. They have limited rights compared to non-clones, and the expectation is that they will die from having their organs harvested sometime in young adulthood.

I knew the premise going in because I saw it discussed years ago, and I suspect it wouldn't be that hard to figure it out even before it's made explicit. But I'm sure it also depends on what your expectations are going into the book, if you're looking for a "twist" and how broad you think the scope of possible twists is. Personally, I think it does the book a disservice to coyly market it as literary fiction, if that's the reason the premise has been treated as a secret. For people who like both litfic and specfic equally maybe it's fine, but that's not everyone, so you're asking for people who only want litfic to be annoyed by the bait-and-switch, and for some proportion of people who would like the book to never pick it up because they think it's not for them (or to be aggravated by the implication that we're not calling it specfic because it's "serious literature" instead). I knew it was speculative fiction and I enjoyed it as speculative fiction, and I think dancing around the genre is unnecessary. So that's where I sit with it.

My thoughts which assume you know the premise but don't necessarily assume you've read the book

Anyway! I really liked the book! Based on the three Ishiguro books I have now read, (this, Klara and the Sun, and The Remains of the Day, I've come to appreciate his skill in writing characters who have a perspective on the world that could be considered "limited" in that the reader and the other characters understand things the POV characters don't, but it's very clear that their lived experience has validity and their inner emotional landscape is as rich as anyone's. No matter how small a person's world may look from the outside, to them it is everything.

Kathy and the other clones see things from a certain angle because of the way they've been raised and what they've been taught to believe. They don't automatically perceive the horror of their existence the way we do because they aren't us, they don't know what we know about how things ought to be. But within their own frame of reference, they live their lives and make choices according to their own understanding of who has authority and what the inevitable facts of life are. Their experiences, memories, feelings, insights, and relationships matter even if we can see how constrained they are by their circumstances. After all, we are also bounded by what we perceive as inevitable facts of life, and we also don't know whether we perceive that correctly.

I think the book reflects how we are socialized not to talk about (let alone question) uncomfortable societal truths. I was struck by Kathy's observation that as the students were growing up, the teachers drip-fed them bits of information that they were not quite old enough to understand. She realizes this may not even have been consciously planned, but it had the effect of making them feel they had "always known" what they were and the life that had been chosen for them, even though they had no specific memories of being told. I think this is a bullseye description of what it feels like to be socialized to accept injustice.

Children don't just learn from what is directly stated to them, they learn from what isn't said, from adults' discomfited grimaces, annoyed dismissals, vague contextless remarks, and awkward changes of subject. The school setting (which was a choice on the part of the characters, to structure the clones' residence as a school—it's not like these kids know what schools are really like in the outside world) to me drives this point home. The adults are trying to educate the students for reasons of their own that we learn later, but the primary lesson they're teaching isn't on the curriculum.

Some specific thoughts that reveal details from the end of the book

Once we got the full explanation of what the school really was, that they were trying to "prove" the clones had souls, I found it just as disturbing as the concept of organ donor clones in itself. Miss Emily's goal wasn't to prove the clones' humanity so they could be liberated and the hideous practice of organ harvest put to an end, it was to prove their humanity so they could be treated a little bit better before the slaughter.

The fact that she is able to tolerate this cognitive dissonance speaks volumes about what she has been indoctrinated to accept, and points to the modes of thought underpinning the broader dystopian world. This, for me, was the true horrifying reveal, and it's all the more horrifying because it is entirely mundane: The belief that a class of people is subhuman can withstand knowledge that disproves the belief, provided that abandoning the belief is inconvenient enough.

By the same token, Miss Emily's description of how public opinion turned against her ideas and led to the closure of Hailsham is so deeply unsettling because it is so familiar and plausible. A push for expanded rights for a marginalized group, even an incremental push, is a precarious thing that can be derailed by a poorly-timed scandal or a negative association, even if the connection is tenuous. As in our own world, many people's beliefs are not based on reason, on consistent principles, or even on a blunt assessment that saving some people justifies sacrificing others. They're based on how much of the truth you can convince yourself to dismiss. If you're looking for a reason to discredit calls for justice, you'll always find one, and you'll find plenty of people happy to validate your conclusion.

Emily's story doesn't spell this out. As always, it's between the lines as she skips over assumed context that Kathy and Tommy don't share. And they're not even looking for justice, only a temporary reprieve from the fate they've already accepted. But they can't get that, not even when they ask nicely. (Does it ever work to ask nicely?)

My biggest takeaway from the book is how difficult it is to independently invent the idea of a just world when that concept has been denied to you. And how much harder when even the people who come the closest to being your allies don't actually want justice—they want injustice with the sharpest of its vulgar edges politely sanded off.

I have a running list of games I remember from my childhood that I add to whenever I think of one. I always think there can't possibly be any more game memories to unearth, and I'm always wrong. For this one I blame/credit zorealis, who brought it up during one of our regular nostalgia rambles.

Wheel of Fortune is a letter-guessing game based on the long-running US game show. It's like Hangman, or if the kids don't play Hangman anymore then it's like Wordle. The added strategy element is that before you guess a letter you have to spin the wheel to determine how many points your guess will be worth if it's right. The wheel also features bad outcomes like skipping your turn or losing all your points.



This DOS version of the game is very easy and probably aimed at children. You can play hotseat multiplayer, otherwise the game provides NPC opponents who don't exactly pass the Turing Test; I found it difficult to lose to them even when I tried. They'd cheerfully guess Q or Z for no reason, even while R and T were still sitting there like so many low-hanging consonant fruits. Poor pixel Vanna White always kept a professional smile on her face as she clapped encouragingly for each spin of the wheel, but I know she was secretly judging us, languishing in her pixel heels as she waited for someone to guess a right letter so she could awkwardly shuffle over there and turn it already, for God's sake.

The reason I was trying to let them win was that I was curious what would happen. When a human player wins, they get to do a solo bonus round. Would it make me sit through the computer doing it too?

( Let's find out )

I don't think I played this game very much as a kid. Even in 1987 there were more engaging options. But if you're like me and have been holding onto memories of it in some dusty disused corner of your hippocampus, you can play Wheel of Fortune in your browser.

subtitle that didn't fit in the subject line: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The "braid" of the the title refers to the interweaving of Western science with Indigenous knowledge to create a way of looking at the world that is stronger than either one alone. In a series of wide-ranging essays she elaborates on this idea from many angles, exploring the economic and cultural factors that lead us to feel cut off from the land that sustains us, and the consequences for our environment, our society, and our mental health.

I found the book effective at developing an intuitive sense of what she means and what it looks like to hold complementary truths and change our relationship with the planet. She argues that the problem isn't just seeing the environment as a possession to exploit, but also the common perception of "nature" as something separate from ourselves that we mustn't touch, like a fragile exhibit in a museum that we can only admire with our hands clasped behind our backs. Indigenous relationships with the land are mutual interactions, and active land management in the Americas long predates colonization. She points out that while those of us who aren't Indigenous can't appropriate those cultures, we can still cultivate a relationship of intimate reciprocity with the land we live on in our own way. I was struck by her comment that many North American settlers seem to have one foot on the land and one still on the boat, as if we're not really sure if we're staying. It's been a long time; maybe, for all our sakes, we need to start treating this like home.

The book is beautifully written, and struck me as deeply evocative of the Obama era in its themes of reaching across gulfs of misunderstanding and its appeals to hope. Kimmerer cautions that despair robs us of our agency, which was perhaps easier to say in 2013, but I believe the message is more relevant now than ever.

I have to admit that at close to 400 pages I think the book might be too long, and some of the later essays began to feel like they were reiterating earlier points rather than expanding upon them. It might read better if you interspersed the essays with reading other things rather than plowing straight through, but I have a hard time doing that so maybe it's on me. The book does offer a lot to think about and isn't the kind of material that can be digested quickly, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long time.