Reviews with content warning for Death of parent - New York Ghost

I feel like I'm losing my ability to rate things objectively but the truth is that I'm just reading books that I'm enjoying.
I liked Severance a lot more than I thought I would, it gave me the same 'everything is depressing and I'm a young person' vibes that Normal People did. It's so weird that this was written in 2018, before COVID struck the world, so much of the world reflects what life looked like/ looks like now. I think while it's confronting reading a book about a pandemic while you're living through one it's also comforting to see that things could be worse, no zombies in real life, win.

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jmcordero's review against another edition

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dark funny reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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booksandmo's review against another edition

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dark reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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libbyhb's review against another edition

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dark funny reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This was a perfect addition to the pandemic reads I've already done in the last year and a half. I enjoyed so much about this book - Candace as a character, the jumps between different narrative timelines, all of the settings and their thorough descriptions. What I loved most was the writing style and the commentary, though. Ling Ma writes with such insight into humanity and American culture (and the Chinese immigrant experience, too, I would imagine). I appreciated the fun/surprising/meaningful choices she made, like making Candace work on the production of Bibles or the way that the fevered were characterized by their obsession with routine - and how Candace also obsessively followed routines in the early months of the fever outbreak. To that point, I kind of liked how "unrealistic" Candace's mid-epidemic choices were. It made for a more surreal story. I loved this!!

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jourdanicus's review against another edition

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emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Wow... I'm not sure what to make of this book. It was definitely emotionally challenging, reading from the other side of 2020. Ling Ma depicted Shen fever in a way that feels disturbingly prescient after experiencing the covid-19 pandemic. Observing a fictional outbreak/epidemic through the lens of a single character (as opposed to a wider lens or omniscient narrator) with life experiences of immigration from China, womanhood, the death of both parents, and all else that made up Candace's character felt tenderly painful, emotionally moving, and ultimately reflective. I appreciated that Ma's landscape of mid- and post-"apocalypse" was not gratuitously violent in the way that so many zombie or apocalypse/post-apoc narratives are. This book left me with a lot of half-formed, unanswered questions, but I like that about it.

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annreadsabook's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I loved this book! I think many have revisited or picked up this novel in recent months because of its eerie resemblance to the coronavirus pandemic, despite the fact that Severance was written years before the COVID outbreak.

The main reason I liked this book, though, is that despite being in large part about a pandemic, it is not a science fiction novel. I enjoyed it for two specific reasons:

1) Its examination of memory, routine, and connectedness to places and loved ones. The pandemic in Severance is a fever that results in victims mindlessly repeating familiar routines in familiar places ad infinitum until they fully succumb to the disease. This is smartly paralleled with the protagonist's revisiting of her past in Fujian, her relationship to her parents, and her experience as an immigrant and daughter of immigrants. Additionally, while Candace sees countless fever victims carry out their repeated tasks, the unfevered Candace herself is not much different from them, as she sequesters herself in her office to continue the same job day in and day out, even as a pandemic ravages NYC.

2) Its underlying discussion of myopic materialism and grind culture. Candace, the protagonist, is so caught up in her desire to further her career and achieve personal success (in pursuit of the "American Dream") that the pandemic that eventually clears out her office barely phases her. I was reminded of how corporate work in COVID times carried on as usual despite often seeming insignificant compared to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

The only reason I'm not giving this a full 5 stars is because I honestly felt the ending left something to be desired, as it felt rather abrupt (I got to the last page and was confused as to where the rest of the book was!). While I do like long books, I rarely feel that books should actively be made longer, but with Severance, I feel that having maybe 50 additional pages to better wrap up the loose ends would've been nice.

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pamreads's review against another edition

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challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

3.5

This book felt more like a horror novel because I made the smartest decision to read this while living in a pandemic. It's super scary reading this and comparing it to what's happening now. I obviously made the super smart choice for my mental health :P I really liked how the novel went back and forth in time. Candace's narrative really helps you understand how the fever progressed, especially with a novel as short as this one. While it's a really good story and I understand why the author would leave it open-ended, I unrealistically wanted a happy ending because reality is too spooky for me.

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