“Severance” by Ling Ma

Weekend before last, we had the opportunity to go to a cute little bookshop in Atlanta's Ponce City Market: Posman Books. I guess there were more customers in the store than I prefer, but the shelves were full of lots of good books, along with fun bookish appurtenances. As we browsed, the title Severance caught my eye (along with the cover's pretty pink color!), and I wondered if the book had anything to do with the Apple TV show that has so baffled me (it doesn’t). But then I ended up standing there and reading the entire prologue in the store, oblivious to anything going on around me. And I did not want to stop reading. 

But by the time I actually sat down to read the book several days later, I had already forgotten what I learned from the prologue, so I just had to start over again. And weirdly, I did not find it so compelling the second time around, which made me worry for the rest of the book. But now, having reached the end, I've decided that this was just an effect of re-reading the prologue after having read it so recently.

This is the story of Candace Chen, a young-ish Chinese-American woman living in New York City in 2011 and working in a publishing consulting firm (specifically, the Bible production division). But it's also the story of her childhood, from the age of four when her parents immigrated to the US without her, to the age of six when she moved to the US to join her parents, to her older, teen-aged years and the loss of her parents. AND it's the story of a devastating global pandemic and its aftermath. 

It was, of course, the pandemic part of the book that stood out to me the most. In fact, this book brought back so many not-so-fond memories of 2020 that this fact blows my mind: Severance was published almost two years before the term "COVID-19" even existed. How could this book NOT have been based on our real-life pandemic? Yeah, maybe the fictional pandemic was fungal instead of viral, but it even originated in China. Quarantines, travel bans, wearing masks, working from home, arguments over the ethics of allowing people to mass together to protest . . . it's like Ling Ma was predicting the future. 

Was anyone else a little unsatisfied with the ending? Kind of like this one?