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    Severance: A Novel
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    Severance: A Novel
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    Severance: A Novel
    Ebook338 pages5 hours

    Severance: A Novel

    By Ling Ma

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.

    "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org

    “A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle

    NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire

    Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection

    Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

    So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

    Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

    A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

    Editor's Note

    Smart page-turner…

    Imagine a crossover episode between “The Office” and “The Walking Dead,” and you’ve got Ling Ma’s terrific debut novel. It somehow manages to satirize everything from careerism to apocalyptic thrillers without sacrificing empathy or believability. A super smart page-turner.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 14, 2018
    ISBN9780374717117
    Author

    Ling Ma

    Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She is the author of the novel Severance, which received the Kirkus Prize, a Whiting Award, the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award. She lives in Chicago with her family.

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    Reviews for Severance

    4/5

    521 ratings39 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Best literary post-apocalypse fiction I’ve ever read! And I love the immigrant identity stuff being intertwined too
    • 5/5
      I don't know if perfect books exist, but if they do, it's this.
    • 5/5
      What a trip. I cannot wait until the second volume in what must be a series. Ms.Ma spins three stories seamlessly. I could almost smell the shark fin soup.
    • 2/5
      Dreary and unoriginal. Modern life and capitalism are alienating and deadening, immigration can be self-alienating, male/female relationships can be alienating and objectifying, and ooh look it's all illustrated by a disease that is really just a shallowly explored metaphor.
    • 4/5
      “This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.” “The Hollow Men” -T.S. EliotSeverance by Ling Ma is an unusual but elegant combination of immigration story and post-apocalyptic drama. Thematically, it addresses the human desire for belonging that is derailed by mistrust and urban alienation. It also makes a statement about our modern tendency to adhere compulsively to conformity despite conflicting ideals of individuality and personal freedom. Ling Ma’s protagonist, Candace Chen, is a new transplant to New York City after having lost both of her parents. The rest of her family lives in China, so she has no real connections upon her arrival. At first, she aimlessly wanders the city taking photographs that even she admits are unoriginal. Eventually, she falls into a job working in an international book printing office. Candace finds herself caught in an endless loop of routine-with mostly superficial friendships and little hope for change or advancement. She even clings to her daily rituals as the world succumbs slowly to an epidemic that culminates in the breakdown of civilization. The sickness, called Shen Fever, causes the infected (“the Fevered”) to act like robotic zombies, engaging in rote motions until they inevitably die from neglect of their basic needs. The plague spreads insidiously, creeping over the globe with no discernable reason as to why some people fall ill while others remain immune. Candace reluctantly leaves the city only when pressured by the lack of services and a secret she can no longer contain. She is welcomed into a group of survivors in search of a place to settle and begin a new life. Their dogmatic leader enforces order with evangelical zeal and may have ulterior motives. The novel alternates between Candace’s experience as a child new to America, her life in NY, and her experience dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophe. Severance is a quick but addictive read- unique and thought-provoking. What does it take to wake us up out of our comfort zones and propel us into taking action when these zones are no longer inhabitable? Is the security of being accepted and cared for worth the cost of independence? Ling Ma’s debut novel is funny but disturbing, refreshing but uncomfortably familiar. Definitely a new author worth recommending and watching for her future efforts.
    • 4/5
      Station Eleven meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation - or, perhaps more accurately, Dawn of the Dead meets Office Space. An incredibly powerful satire which I would recommend heartily to everyone, this book is brilliant on our sense of belonging, be it in a relationship, a workplace or a city, while having all the pulpy enjoyment of a post-apocalyptic thriller. I’ve deducted one star for the ending, which I wasn’t wild about, but that’s really nitpicking.
    • 3/5
      I really liked the writing in this. The immigrant experience was very interesting and added color to the novel. I also really liked the rendering of New York City, which was so true but also elevated. I hated the pregnancy storyline. I also hated the lack of ending. Strictly worse than Station Eleven, which precedes it and is quite similar.
    • 2/5
      I normally love a good satire, especially one involving an apocalypse, but I was disappointed by Severance. It felt as though it had so much potential, however, it was missed. The story dragged and the characters felt underdeveloped.
    • 4/5
      This is technically a post-apocalyptic book, but the Shen fever that leaves much of the world dead or incapacitated is hardly the point. Candace is the millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her experience both before the outbreak and after reflects on immigration, consumerism, social connection, and so much more. She is oddly detached, but the writing is so enthralling it’s hard to look away.
    • 4/5
      A fast, non-taxing read that's somewhat interesting, but not exactly a page turner.I heard really strong buzz about this and wanted to read and judge for myself. It lived up to the hype as well as anything does, I guess - neither unputdownable, nor a letdown. Although I understood it to be dystopian satire, I think it's closer to something like apocalyptic allegory. If you're really into dystopian, this is atypical of the genre and may not be satisfying to you.The apocalypse, in this case, is caused by a virus delivered globally via import/export that decimates major cities the world over. Set in New York with an imagined Chicago wasteland also featured, the band of virus-immune survivors set up little communities in an attempt to recreate and facilitate a future.Oddly set in the near past (which dates the book in a way that seems unnecessary), it reads more modern with a futuristic bent, since obviously our world hasn't exactly come to an end yet. I think that's part of the disconnect for me...dystopian novels present a future that *could* become true, but this one obviously couldn't be since it's set in the past, so there's no 'what if-ness' to it, nor are any of the characters particularly riveting. Though the story trails off, there's no definitive closure to the ending, so if that's a dealbreaker for you...choose something else.
    • 4/5
      Candace Chen is a young Chinese-American working a job she isn't happy about and dating a guy who's not going to stick around. She's also one of the last people to leave New York City when it's essentially wiped out by a plague that causes people to go into a permanent zombie-like state in which they endlessly go through the rote motions of tasks they performed in life.This is a blend of literary fiction and post-apocalyptic story that I think is much more calculated to appeal to the litfic readers than the post-apocalypse fans, but as someone who enjoys both, I found it quite satisfying. It feels like it's reflecting on -- or maybe just plain reflecting -- a lot of the realities of modern life and human nature in a really interesting way.
    • 5/5
      I was immediately engrossed in this satirical takedown of office culture, labor outsourcing, and the routines we use to establish our identities. The tone is similar to Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go' or Atwood's 'The Year of the Flood', so if you enjoyed those, try this. It floored me in the best way.
    • 4/5
      Best for:Those who enjoy novels that move around in time. Those who liked Station Eleven.In a nutshell:The fever has taken over the world. Candace has survived it, and is now traveling with other survivors. Through chapters alternating in the past and present, we learn what Candace’s life (and the life of her immigrant parents) was like, and is like now.Worth quoting:“It made me wistful for the illusion of New York more than for its actuality, after having lived there for five years.”Why I chose it:I saw it in a few book stores and kept picking it up. Finally had to go for it.Review:This is a situation where I don’t want to give away too much, because I think the less you know, the more interesting the book is. I accidentally glanced at just a bit of one Cannonballer’s review in my feed and while they didn’t spoil anything, I think something they mentioned did take away from my reading of it because I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I suggest that, if you’re at all interested in reading this book, you just pick it up and read it.The book looks at so many big ideas — capitalism, immigration, survivalism, urban living — but also smaller, relatable intimacies, such as competition at work, relationships (romantic, platonic, familial), daily life choices. Her boyfriend Jonathan starts out as a mildly interesting character, but I found Candace’s evolution of her view of him to be relatable and more interesting that Jonathan himself. I like the style of going back and forth in time - I’m not sure this book would be as compelling were it told in a straightforward manner. But at the same time, author Ma is a talented writer, able to create a vivid picture without flowery or overly-descriptive language. I have a strong idea of what the manufacturing plant in China looks like, the hotel, Candace’s New York apartments, her office. I did live in New York for many years, so I think that may have increased my enjoyment of the book a bit, but if it were set in another major city I’m sure I would have devoured it all the same (in any case, I started this book on a Wednesday and finished it Thursday evening, and worked both of those days).Keep it / Pass to a Friend / Donate it / Toss it:Pass to a Friend. One has already called dibs, in fact.
    • 2/5
      For me, this book was like a famous abstract painting or sculpture. I can appreciate the talent and technical prowess of the artist, but I can't see the purpose. In the case of this book, I can appreciate the authors ability to write evocatively and convey how people think and feel, but I just don't see the point of the book. From my point of view, the main character just wanders and stumbles through her life and struggles without ever finding a direction or purpose.
    • 4/5
      Not long ago, I decided that the genres of romance and dystopian lit don't mesh very well. Now, I'm here to say that dystopian lit meshes superbly with literary fiction, with this book being my sole example.Candace is a young woman living in New York. She shares an apartment with a friend, throwing parties and filling her blog, NY Ghost, with pictures of the city she is growing to love. She's met a guy she likes and eventually finds a job at a publishing company, supervising the printing of various Bibles, which involves her going on business trips to China, the country she emigrated from when she was six years old and her father received a grant to get his doctorate at a university in Utah. Ma writes so engagingly about Candace, a woman who prefers to have things happen to her than to take decisive action. Her job's not great, but it's not bad. Her boyfriend isn't perfect, but he's not terrible. When Shen Fever reaches New York, she keeps going into her job in Manhattan. Once bus service ends, she stays in an empty office and continues to send emails to China, and filing status reports, despite the rapidly diminishing number of people coming in to work. Long after she's the last one working, she finally leaves New York and finds a small group to travel with. The group's leader wants to be some kind of cult leader, but no one really takes him seriously, or at least Candace doesn't. What made this novel work is that all of it was so interesting. Ma makes Candace's memories of growing up in Salt Lake City and of being generally aimless in New York as fascinating as life in the cult, traveling across the depopulated US, stopping now and then to "go stalking," which is to say, breaking into people's houses and stealing stuff. As the group becomes more restrictive, Candace awakens to the fact that she will have to take decisive action if she wants to survive.
    • 5/5
      What exactly was I expecting from this book? Yet another dystopian tale. And yes there was that (this thing called Shen Fever has affected the world) but there was also so much more. There was a story about immigrants - a couple from Fujian province who leave their young daughter to be raised by grandparents while they try to find a better life in the US, bringing her over only a few years later. I was excited - Fujian province, that’s where some of my family is from! But also I was intrigued by how this woman continues to work at her job in New York City as the world crumbles around her. And the unusual epidemic, in which the “fevered” go through the motions of their daily lives over and over. For instance, a woman sets the table and her family raises their utensils to “eat” then she clears the table and it all begins again. And yet there are subtle differences with each repetition. There is a kind of coldness to the book and yet it is irresistible and I am drawn to this woman and the cult of sorts she finds herself in. A strange and intriguing read.
    • 5/5
      Extremely well written and deserving of the recognition it has received - for readers of literary, post-apocalyptic fiction. It's about consumerism, immigration, survival, growing up in the 80's, a worst-case and devastating epidemic scenario, and also about just getting up and repeating routines each day. A fresh take on the meaning of work, on living in an urban environment, and on imagining a country full of zombies.
    • 5/5
      Picture that scene on the incomparable show 'Community' when Jeff Winger is typing on his Blackberry as a zombie, and that scene is this book. A fungus is creating the "fevered" who go through the motions of what they did before they were fevered. Though the fevered seem zombie-like, they aren't actually zombies, they aren't attacking people, but that doesn't make the situation less haunting. Within this intriguing scenario, is Candace, a girl who moved to America from China as a child. Now she works on the 32nd floor in an office in Times Square as a product manager, mainly getting bibles made. I love those character-in-solitude type of books. Then throw in an apocalyptic scenario and I'm all in. Some might say there is too much detail here, but I love those sorts of small details. And because this is a book about nostalgia and memory, maybe those small details are intentional. Aren't most memories and nostalgia based on those small details? The story keeps flipping between Candace's early life, as things are falling apart, and what happens shortly after when there are barely any non-fevered left. I thought Ling Ma was able to balance all three of these "time lines" seamlessly and I was never bored with any of it. Her sentences are full of life. Candace is such a lovely, fully formed character. The book far exceeded what I expected from the description, what I thought the description would be capable of. I'll read anything Ling Ma writes. The non-fevered characters "stalk" houses and buildings for supplies which could only remind me of 'Roadside Picnic' by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. (Tarkovsky is actually mentioned in the book and he also directed the movie 'Stalker' so possibly I'm not imagining things here, though many books have been reminding me of Roadside Picnic lately.) Severance is also very similar to another awesome book this year 'The Book of M' by Peng Shepherd that involves memory in a disintegrating world.
    • 4/5
      This is a good summer read. The author writes an exciting story , going back and forth from the past to present and back again. The only thing keeping it from 5 stars, is a weak plot conclusion, or no real conclusion to me. There are several loose ends at the end, as if it is just Part 1 but I doubt that, with the double timelines of the story.
    • 3/5
      I liked the main character and the whole idea but sometimes it fell flat
    • 4/5
      Reader/reviewers seem to have lobbed a number of criticisms at Severance, and, by and large, they're pretty much spot-on. "Severance" is an immigrant narrative and a post-apocalyptic zombie story and a coming-of-age-in-hipster-Brooklyn-in-the-oughts novel, and its disparate parts don't really blend together all that well. The novel can't quite make up its mind as to what it wants to be. The cult leader we meet could have been more compelling. The ending could have been better. Ling Ma writes well, but she's just not writer that Colson Whitehead is.But I rather liked "Severance" because Ma managed to take her story into some very interesting thematic directions. Her main character, Candace Chen, has led a disjointed life: orphaned in young adulthood, she's a Chinese immigrant who grew up in Utah and expected to find something better in New York City. Candace's parents seem to have adapted in superficial ways but, cut off from their homeland and their families, don't often seem like all that emotionally well-developed. "Severance" would seem to be an obvious title for a narrative like this one. But while a lot of literature attempts to teach its readers how to draw strength from the past, Ma's attitude seems to be more conflicted. In a book that features zombies repeating the same actions they did in life until their bodies run down, the past often seems more of a danger than a resource. Candace's life in Brooklyn was unsatisfactory -- she was lonely and worked a job that was prestigious but not really remunerative or meaningful. Her boyfriend's hipster poverty seems increasingly threadbare by the time he leaves New York and he epidemic hits, leaving Candace without a job and without direction. Ultimately, her challenge, it might be said, is to try to find a livable present and a viable future. Sometimes, Ma seems to be arguing, it's impossible to draw a solid through-line that connects all your experiences, and you have to make do. Sometimes severance is necessary.The other element of this book that impressed me was the way it addresses the strange contradictions global capitalism. Candace is Chinese-born and speaks a respectable Mandarin, but she's a foreigner in China and her counterparts and the printing company she deals with don't hesitate to let her know that they're aware of how they're being exploited. This ties Candace and the book's Chinese characters -- and, by extension, the rest of us -- together in uncomfortable ways. Saying that epidemics don't respect borders is pretty much a medical fact -- and these days, it's a lesson learned -- but Ma seems to be arguing that the exploitative elements of global capitalism can't be contained by borders either. She subtly demonstrates that everybody in the book is part of the same machine. Guilt and complicity are also unavoidably contagious. Yes, even her would-be writer boyfriend, who refuses to take jobs that threaten his "integrity." In this sense, the zombie epidemic provides Candace and her yet-to-be-born baby with a means of escape from a whole set of seemingly unresolvable problems: her boring job, her dying relationship, the standard immigrant dream she was more-or-less born into. It'd be nice, frankly, if our pandemic could open up the same sort of possibilities for us. We'll have to wait and see. In closing, I will have to say that I rather liked Candace herself as a character. She's not, it must be said, the most fascinating person that I've met in a book, but I think that her very ordinariness is somewhat deliberate. At one point, Candace's mother implores her to "be of use," and in many ways, Candace is: she's hard working, responsible, and preternaturally efficient. A product of her background, then. She spends much of "Severance" learning that that, in itself, might not be enough. I can't say that she opens up, exactly, over the course of this novel, but, by the end of it, she has a better idea of her former life's limitations. This a problematic novel, but also one that I can recommend to those interested in immigrant narratives and transcultural stories.
    • 3/5
      Terrible ending.
    • 3/5
      Normally, if I flipped through a novel and didn't see any quotation marks, I wouldn't buy it. This may seem irrational, but I am a big fan of punctuation, and trying to parse dialogue without quotation marks makes me tired, so I've rejected that trend. However, I neglected to do so with this book, and in the end, it didn't bother me too much--mostly, the dialogue was clear. I liked the writing, but overall, I think the novel failed to gel properly. It's the story of a single Chinese American woman named Candace living in New York City as a terrifying pandemic called Shen Fever gradually turns the city into a ghost town inhabited mainly by the "fevered," who behave like zombies with OCD. This description of Candace's routine office-work life as the city falls apart around her was for me the most compelling section of the book, but I felt that the overabundance of Candace's back story--her parents, her family in China, her boyfriend (for whom she had set the bar very low)--were overlong and distracting. I'm not sure what they added. I also had a hard time understanding the timeline of Candace's pregnancy; surely, if she had gotten pregnant in the summer, she would have been obviously so by the time she left New York in December. She does leave New York and hooks up with a cult of fellow survivors led by a creepy guy named Bob and traveling somewhere called the Facility. Candace manages to hide her pregnancy from them for most of the trip. This part would have been very compelling--here we get several scenes of outright horror as they deal with the fevered--but I just couldn't get a sense of these new characters. Bob should have been a much more interesting person than he turned out to be. The end seemed anticlimactic, and I struggled to find meaning in it. All in all, this is good writing, some interesting ideas, some affecting scenes, but lacking something essential that hooks me in and helps me care about what happens to Candace.
    • 4/5
      Adapting to Almost Anything

      Immigrants are not only peripatetic, they also are adaptable, though the transition and adoption of new circumstances often comes at a price. For many of us, however, the vast majority of us, breaking out of our societal molds, living beyond our routines, well, giving these up is akin to kicking a pernicious disease; not likely to happen. These ideas comprise the glue that bind Ling Ma’s nicely done mashup of dystopia, contagion catastrophe, zombie apocalypse, little “r” religious cultism, consumer mania, and oblique workplace critique into a cohesive debut.

      The storyline is simple. Our heroine Candace Chen, daughter of immigrant parents, works as a production assistant in a contract firm that produces books for publishers. She works on the greatest and most reiterative book of all time, the Bible. Even as Shen fever ravages all of the New York around her, she reports to her office and works on. When there’s no work to be done, she makes work for herself and carries on, a living version of the Shen fever victims, zombies who continue performing receptive tasks, like the folding woman in the clothing store or the taxi driver who drives on dead.

      Candace’s routine ends when there is nothing for her in New York, no workmates, no boyfriend by whom she is pregnant, no transportation, and no food. She realizes she has to leave. She does and hooks up with a group led by a former IT guy named Bob, a terrific mundane name for a cultist leader with murderous intent, a self-righteous Rick Grimes type without the manliness. When Bob discovers Candace’s pregnancy, he sees her as symbol of hope to be held at any cost. In the end, the end catches up with Bob and his band of wanders who have set up home in a mall outside Chicago, and Candace and her future child gain their freedom, to head out and adapt again to the new reality.

      Amid all of this, Ling Ma does a nice job of satirizing our consumer society. Candace in the midst of horror always finds time to moisturize her face with the most expensive products available. Her thoughts about the crassness of development and city life, expressed by her boyfriend, and living in all that a city or society has to offer, like eating in its restaurants, shopping in its stores, visiting its museums, do make you stop and consider your own feelings about urban life. Then there is the whole thing about nostalgia, whether for the old country and her youth that occupy Candace, or the place in which you found the most comfort, like Bob’s attraction to the mall, the grail he held out as the Facility. In short, she has filled her novel with lots of nuance that takes a little while to sink in, and that makes Severance a worthwhile read.
    • 4/5
      This is the story of a woman who is a daughter of Chinese immigrants in the US. The story jumps around in her life, focusing on a few years before and the months immediately after a deadly pandemic kills most of the population. Before the pandemic, she lives in New York city, working a job that she doesn't really find fulfilling, in a relationship that also isn't very fulfilling. After the pandemic, she travels with a group of people, raiding homes and stores for food, on their way to a sanctuary in Ohio.It's weird reading a novel about a pandemic that was written before the covid pandemic. Pandemic novels will never be the same, because it's impossible not to compare the imagined pandemic to the real one. In the novel, people are not nearly so stupid as they were in real life, and there wasn't a racist backlash even though the disease originated in China. Of course, this disease is nothing like covid - it has a very high fatality rate, and the way people die is pretty nightmarish.But of course, comparing this pandemic to covid is completely missing the point. The point of this book is that the post-apocalyptic world isn't really any different from the pre-apocalyptic world. Before the pandemic, Candace lives her unfulfilling meandering life as a cog in a capitalist machine, where she feels like she has no purpose and nothing to contribute. The disease shuts down people's brains and turns them into zombie-like drones who do the same tasks over and over (they don't eat brains though), just like cogs in a capitalist machine. The book is rather uneven. Candace is not exactly likeable - her defining character trait is a purposeless ennui that makes her hard to care about. Sometimes the book feels tense and fast-paced, and sometimes it's just tedious office politics. It's not exciting enough to be a thriller, and it has a general light tone that isn't quite comedic, largely because Candace doesn't really take anything seriously.
    • 5/5
      Not your usual dystopian / end of the world novel. Actually, for the main character, her pre-end life does not much differ from her post-end life. And maybe that's the point and the metaphor here. I have to confess not being able to put it down until I was done. The end comes, but it comes very slowly and gradually, which makes it all the more horrifying. The zombies - or as they are called here, the fevered, those afflicted by the shen fever that kills almost everybody - are not walking-dead-style zombies. They go through their most routine activity, repeatedly, mechanically, mindlessly, until they waste away.
      I saw a lot of review mentioning how funny the book was. That is was not my read at all (I could be wrong, obviously), again, I was more horrified by the slow decay of the world and the progressively crushing solitude of all the characters.
      It is not coincidental, of course, that the narrative weaves together a world-ending fever originating in China, affecting first workers in export-oriented industries, including the one where the main character, herself a child of Chinese immigrants, works. There are definite parallels between the barely-known Chinese relatives to the main character and the survivors group she ends up joining.
      The kicker, of course, is the writing itself which mimics the behavior of the fevered.
    • 5/5
      After a couple of meh books, I was so happy to have come across a book that I absolutely loved! This one was so hard to put down; I wanted, no NEEDED to find out what happened next. I was transfixed by everything in this book-the plot, the characters, the flashbacks , the commentary on immigration, millennials in the workforce, one’s dedication to their employer, and the stark reality of foreign workers producing American goods. We follow our protagonist Candace during the outbreak of a fever that sweeps the globe. Candace is in New York City at the time of the outbreak, and we are shown glimpses of her past, as well as her parent’s immigrating to America. It helped deepen the plot and strengthen Candace’s character. In between we find that Candace has joined a band of survivors who may have ulterior motives, and what the world looks like now that the majority of humans have disappeared. It reminded me of so many apocalyptic movies and books, but at the same time it strongly retained its originality. The author did a spectacular job of creating an engrossing atmosphere that I felt claustrophobia, fear, anger, and desperation along with Candace. As with other well written dystopian novels I have read as of late, I would love to see this be adapted into a movie or tv show. I also look forward to Ms. Ma’s next book.
    • 4/5
      I don'y know how much I would have enjoyed this if I hadn't read it in 2020. I actually don't know how much I enjoyed it reading it in 2020. It is just a little too creepy. Kind of like Bob.I guess the author is mocking post-apocalyptic novels. Or maybe modern American culture. or maybe both. How her company offers a big bonus for those who will stay behind and keep working as others flee the city. How Candace keeps going to work, even as the metro, and then the shuttles, stop running., How she is still managing to call and actually get cabs. How a company of armed guards comes in to guard the most important institutions (or private homes). How she finally caves and moves to the office.The whole Shen fever from China bit was just a bit too creepy. The vague idea she briefly explores of the somehow being connected to memory and turning people into, essentially, not-dangerous zombies was quite interesting.But ugh, Bob. And driving 1000 miles to get to a mall was hysterical if disappointing LOL.Nancy Wu's narration of the audiobook was great. Very dry, she was well cast to read this.
    • 4/5
      Almost prescient COVID-like plague end-of-the-world story, that gets so many things right two years before the actual pandemic. Actually not much action, more of a social commentary on our repetitive human behavior, but overall a good story.
    • 5/5
      Good grief, could I have picked a more stressful book to read during a pandemic and the scariest election of our lifetime? I chose it for the cover and title, knowing nothing about it but the writing was too great not to forge ahead. Amazing book.