Reviews with content warning for Grief - New York Ghost

Severance by Ling Ma 🛍
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🌇 The plot: Candace Chen is treading water. The routine of her corporate job keeps her from thinking about the recent deaths of her Chinese immigrant parents, her boyfriend leaving New York. It even keeps her from noticing that a fever is taking over, dismantling the city and the world she knew bit by bit. The novel jumps between this and her life After, as part of a band of survivors in the totalitarian grip of a former IT guy called Bob, from whom Candace increasingly wants to escape...
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This book is unbelievably expansive considering it’s under 300 pages. It conjures in great detail experiences of disillusionment, of grief, of what the New Yorker called “the millennial condition” (which at first I thought was a bit lofty but after reading it makes a lot of sense). It was even more impressive to read it during an actual pandemic - there’s a moment when Candace looks up one day and realises that the world around her has totally changed, but that she can’t pinpoint exactly when, which sounds painfully familiar. I also loved the integral role that Candace’s identity as a second generation immigrant plays in this novel, the perspective it gives her and how it contrasts with other post-apocalyptic fiction I’ve read.
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What I loved most is that this is a book about a woman surviving a plague, but it is also a book about how we survive the past. The past is an open wound in this novel: it splits the text, it divides the characters, it divides Candace. Though I loved the spirit of renewal in Station Eleven which I read this time last year, I appreciated the treatment of grief and pain in Severance. Station Eleven leans into nostalgia from the remove of a society rebuilding itself while Severance is still in the blood and guts of it, though I think they are both ultimately occupied with what it takes to keep going, to turn to the future.
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🏪 Read if you love a good anti-capitalist novel that deals with Big Themes but has all the intrigue of a really meaty post-apocalypse novel.
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🚫 Avoid if you don’t like reading pessimistic novels (I wouldn’t say this is fully pessimistic but it is ambivalent), and check the TWs carefully!

Content Warnings