Reviews with content warning for Injury/Injury detail - Salgın

Ooh, I LOVED this book so much. I thought that because of its current popularity on BookTok, it had been written during the pandemic, but it turns out it had been published in 2018 which gave me a sense of foreshadowing 😳

Ling Ma captures the boredom of day-in, day-out hustle culture for the big men; in her Bible production job in New York, it’s evident she’s not loving life but she’s just keeping it going.
In sharp contrast, her perspective on Shen Fever taking over the city and her having to join this group of ‘survivors’ is so interesting and once I’d gotten into the different flashbacks I couldn’t put this book down.

I wasn’t expecting Ashley’s fevered time in her house and could picture all that so clearly. This element of horror was intense and I was wide-eyed the entire time reading it 😳

I really loved the ending to this book as well. I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen in the end but I’m glad it ended the way it did 🥹

SHE GOT AWAY WITH THE BABY, NICE ✨

I would highly recommend this to people who are fans of reading Asian literature and about the immigrant experience… All with a twist. This book reminded me a little bit of The School for Good Mothers! Thank you so much ❤️

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readwithbells's review against another edition

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3.5

A remarkably forward-thinking apocalypse book about a plague that is triggered by or flourishes within nostalgic memories. We follow Candace through a few timelines, one where she becomes the only person working in her company, one where she is caught up in a power-hungry group post-pandemmy, and interspersed with pieces of her childhood and her parent’s lives.

I think this book is well-written and 100% accomplishes what it set out to do, I just prefer books I get more emotionally attached to and this one really kept me at arm’s length. To people who liked Leave the World Behind or Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Severance would be a good comp title. It was just too meandering for me, with a through-line caught up in the flow of memories instead of character arc, which is my personal preference. I’m glad I read it though!

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foldingthepage_kayleigh's review against another edition

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dark emotional reflective tense medium-paced

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

4.5

This book was eerily prescient for what was to come during the COVID-19 pandemic, given that it came out in 2018. This book elicited an interesting emotional response in me, overall leaving me feeling reflective and adrift.

While firmly in the dystopian fiction genre, what I found unique was that this read more like a character study than anything. We follow the main character Candace Chen’s reflections on her life, moving back and forth through each point in her life that were mini-apocalypses in themselves, as her worlds as she knew them collapse.

As a Chinese immigrant who moved to the U.S. when she was 6, themes of belonging/unbelonging resonate strongly throughout this novel, and are elements that give richness to the decisions she made and the points she gets to in her life.

I think what really added to my love of this book was the narrator Nancy Wu’s approach to characterizing Candace. Her style was a sort of a resigned deadpan, which I felt added a depth to the character that I don’t know I would’ve gotten from the tree book.

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itsalina's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense medium-paced

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

3.0

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shoohoob's review against another edition

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medium-paced

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

4.5

I really wish I hadn’t read this during the COVID-19 pandemic 🥲

Really interesting book! It was slow to get into but I very much enjoyed it. I don’t know how to feel about the ending, but I loved the two different stories. As the child of immigrants, I related to many of Candace’s feelings and experiences.

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