Winner of the 2018 Kirkus Prize, A PEN/Hemingway and NYPL Young Lions Finalist, A New York Times Notable Book of 2018, An Indie Next Selection A Best Book of 2018 at Elle, Marie Claire, Refinery29, Bustle, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Bookish, Mental ...

Opinions of this novel ranged from very to mildly positive, and so no one had anything terrible to say about Severance. There were flaws with the book that everyone basically accepted. A few passages were clunky and the quote-science-unquote of the fever was very weak and inconsistent, and the book was much better when it stuck to being evocative and ambiguous. But we all loved the ambiguity with which Ma treated her material. The beautifully unclear distinction between the workaday habits of Candace's NYC life and a fever that causes obsessive repetition was something we kept digging into. The novel simply did a phenomenal job of calling into question the value of routine and nostalgia. We spent a lot of time talking about how China fit into a story about a worldwide fever, and marveled at the beautiful depiction of Candace's parents, one representing the idea of moving forward and breaking ties and the other clinging to the past, as a model for how the fever worked and why the survivors could resist it. A lot of the discussion centered around how precise the novel was -- did Ma carefully construct a detailed Candace who was flirting subtlely with being diseased the entire time, or was Ma more impressionistic throughout and deliberately leaving connections between Chinese labor, NYC living, and a zombifying fever vague? Ultimately, it was this lack of clarity we appreciated, and it allowed us to forgive the less successful world building in favor of indulging the beautiful description of an abandoned New York City, the disturbing image of half-dead people repeating mindless, slightly varied patterns, and the deep critiques of consumerism and religion (as Candace sees Bibles as a unchanging book you exploit underpaid labor to simply recreate multiple times) that wrap all the disparate elements together. We ultimately agreed that Ma had created a very dark, but very compelling story, one in which all nostalgia is suspect and all habits are potentially signs of a soulless life, and embodied it in a deeply representative narrator. Severance is not an uplifting book, but it's a well told story with some very strong and subtle themes.