Her family originally arrived in the USA when she was six years old so her father could pursue a graduate degree in the 1980s. Candace first arrives in New York impassive and untethered, “carried by the tides of others”, after the death of her mother and father. Taking place in the fall of 2011, the novel follows Candace Chen, a millennial daughter of Chinese immigrants working at a Manhattan book publisher. Being a novel about a global pandemic that grinds the world to a halt, Severance reads like a warning from the past, a history of events that hasn’t happened yet. Despite all its 2018 hoopla, however, Severance has experienced a recent resurgence in interest in 2020. Publications such as The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, and The New York Times named Severance as one of the best books of 2018. Ma’s novel received a number of notable awards and accolades, winning the Kirkus prize for fiction and being a Pen/Hemingway award finalist for a debut novel. Not until this past week did I find myself doing it again, this time with Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel Severance. It’s been a long time since I’ve stayed up until the early morning hours reading. The summer of 2011 was a summer well wasted. I’d spend afternoons reading by the side of the public outdoor pool, and when that wasn’t enough, I’d stay up until two or three in the morning reading by my nightlight. My book friend and I burned through Koji Suzuki’s Ring series about haunted VHS tapes and dead girls at the bottom of water tanks, science books by physicist Richard Feynman, and Steig Larsson’s crime-thriller Millenium trilogy.

So, physiologically, video games were ruled out for me. All my other friends at the time were engrossed in playing Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto, and whenever I tried to join in, I would get a motion sickness so intense that I would be throwing up within minutes. I didn’t know how else to fill my time other than with books. We’d spend afternoons browsing the dim aisles of the fiction section, checking out books, and strolling around the nearby lake and trail that led back to our neighborhoods. In the summer between ninth and tenth grade, my friend and I would frequently visit the Newmarket Public Library.

Ling ma severance review