Severance

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Ma, Ling	4-week checkout	Due 04-06-2024
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Ma, Ling	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Dystopian / Ma, Ling	4-week checkout	Due 05-19-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Dystopian / Ma, Ling	4-week checkout	Due 05-09-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / Dystopian / Ma, Ling	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024

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.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Worth the Read submitted by jennycai on July 10, 2022, 1:36pm amazing book, the author switched between the past and present very effectively, and being from the main character's hometown, it hit very close to home to read about the cultural connection.

Slow at first....then YES! submitted by leah karr on August 19, 2022, 6:36pm Took a while for me to get going in this book, but if you like dystopian/pandemic books this is a good one!

Whip-smart workplace satire and pandemic thriller (yes, both) submitted by foilista on July 1, 2023, 11:05am This book is gripping, hilarious, and terrifying -- all at once. It manages to simultaneously offer a biting satire of the workplace AND a truly prescient tale of a respiratory pandemic (yes, it was written before Covid). Ma's writing style kept me engaged from beginning to end, and she knows how to write a villain.