Beverly's Reviews > Severance

Severance by Ling Ma is many things. It is the story of a young Asian woman's search for meaning, the story of a deadly pandemic, and surprisingly, a treatise on the importance of work. It is slow moving and meanders between Candace Chen's life in publishing in New York when life was normal and her life during the pandemic, after she's become part of a group moving across the country and scavenging goods.

Candace's parents died and her boyfriend left before the pandemic hit. She has no family in the United States, all are back in China. She has few friends. Before and during the pandemic, she finds comfort in her work. "It was a trance. It was like burrowing underground, and the deeper I burrowed the warmer it became, and the more the nothing feeling subsumed me, snuffing out any worries and anxieties. It is the feeling I like best about working." A life with meaning, if you have no family or friends, must be about doing.

She has a reason for living that eventually causes her to take control of her life and throw off the shackles of what others want and comes to rely on herself.