Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Post-Apocalyptic, but also Pre-Apocalyptic

Severance by Ling Ma

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BINGO: Own Voices 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 […]

The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in.

Severance by Ling Ma

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Severance is a beautiful book with a lovely pink cover and a mysterious title. It opens and unfolds slowly as you read and then it just stops. It jumps backwards and forwards in time in a slow, meandering pace that feels like it ultimately amounts to nothing. We begin by meeting Candace in a post-apocalyptic world where most of the population has succumbed to Shen fever. Candace has joined a small band of survivors, but she spends most of her time reminiscing about the time […]

A second chance doesn’t mean you’re in the clear.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This is honestly one of, if not the best, novels I have read this year (as in from the year 2019). I was kind of blown away at how much emotional depth and narrative depth there is in this novel. The novel is a kind of post-apocalyptic novel, and it is, but there’s so much background and context provided in the three different timelines and narratives happening in this novel, that’s it’s so much more than “just” a post-apocalyptic. So the timelines/narratives here: we have […]

Deliverance

Severance by Ling Ma

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Severance meanders; take that for what it is and don’t expect more from it and it becomes a valuable exploration of memory in contrast to the present. It’s for people who live in cities and love walking them, both familiar and unfamiliar parts. It’s for people who work because they need to do something, anything, nevermind, what it actually is. It’s for immigrants and people who feel trapped between more than one place, who have matured over states and provinces and cities and across lines. […]

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Severance by Ling Ma

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This was an interesting story that I appreciated far more than I enjoyed. Candace Chen is a 20-something in middle-management at a Manhattan publishing company, in the specialty Bible division. She is good at her job, but she doesn’t really like much about it. It’s a job, it pays the bills. But she has no passion for it. But Candace, like many of her generation, doesn’t really know what it is that she actually does have passion for. She used to like photography, and had […]

The End is Nigh… But So Is My Quarterly Deadline

Severance by Ling Ma

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I thought I had already reviewed this guy but apparently not. Unfortunately it’s been a bit since I read it so this review may not be as specific as I would normally like. Oh well, I liked it and good books stick with you pretty well, so this should still be pretty good. How long do you think it would take for the average person to notice Armageddon had come? For Candace, way longer than most folks would like to think. Candace is a millennial […]



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