Like every delusional young person, I wanted to be enrolled in boarding school where a crumbling but austere academic institution surely held some kind of magic and much unsupervised mischief made just for me, and where I would come into my own as the main character. Reading Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing gave me my first “ah-ha” moment about the kind of education I would more likely receive as a middle-class, brown-skinned student against a field of affluent white, but it didn’t entirely cleanse me of my desire to don a smart uniform and kick leaves across cobblestone with my roomie and neighbor-chums in tow. Does this sound familiar? Do you still feel the yearning for that inaccessible experience and seek it out in books? Well then, I have a work of speculative literature you’ll want to read. One that will crawl under your skin and never leave but that will also bathe you in the essence of that imagined boarding school experience with its deliciously dreary dreaminess and undercurrent of strange happenings afoot. Ready to refresh your shelves? We have a giveaway that can help! Enter to win a 1-year subscription to Book of the Month! Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Kazuo Ishiguro won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature and has produced numerous award-winning books, including The Remains of the Day , which is perhaps his most widely-known novel. Japanese-born but raised in Surrey from an early age, Ishiguro’s England is at once quintessentially English and entirely unique. I would also use these words to describe Never Let Me Go and if you have the privilege of enjoying this book for the first time, I recommend you go into it knowing as little as possible about the premise. I’ll do my best to avoid divulging too much here. I will tell you that it’s set in a boarding school in the English countryside and that our narrator, Kathy, is a compelling observer of her and her classmates’ lives at Hailsham, revealing just enough to clue you in that something isn’t adding up without being so obscure that the story lags. In fact, the curiosities and questions she and her companions, Ruth and Tommy, explore build the tension and sustain the momentum that quickens the pacing of a story so subdued you would expect it to be a slow read. My memories of this book are of a misty campus, drafty rooms, and creaking old furniture. The students have their cliques and their inside secrets. They fill the hallways with muffled whispers and furtive goings-on. But what stays with me most is the big question Ishiguro seems to be seeking the answer to in multiple works: what might the quiet nightmare of proving your humanity look like? And the most sinister point I gleaned from this book–a point that isn’t new or novel to those of us in the BIPOC community–is how mundane and acceptable a society that forces one to do so might look. What are you reading? Let us know in the comments !