Lakewood

I'm going to resist the urge to compare this to [b:Never Let Me Go 6334 Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1353048590l/6334.SY75.jpg 1499998] because it has been 15 years since I read that and I honestly don't remember liking it as much as I liked Lakewood. I really enjoyed this book, some thoughts:I really loved Lena. I loved her dedication to her family and her willingness to try, despite clear danger, to improve her family's situation. I had no problem imagining a world in which the government is using citizens as test subjects for whatever. I was all in, packed and ready to enter Lakewood. Here Giddings kind of blew my mind. The tests never got boring or repetitive. The amount of imagination needed to create this world and to juggle these characters in it....wow! Even the “observers”, many of whom have only the nickname Lena assigns them start to have layers. The cabin scene, the teeth scene, the protest scene-all fantastic. In fact, I need to go back and reread the cabin bit again before book club. And then something happens about a 3/4 way through the book: Lena returns home to Lakewood and the book becomes letters to her best friend, Tanya, and suddenly the story gets 60% better. We are now getting Lena's full thoughts on Lakewood and the characters and she is not holding anything back. It becomes even more real (not the best grammar, but you get me). I'm going to stay spoiler-free but there is so much to discuss here. So very much.