Severance

This novel by Ling MA had high and low points. 

One high point is chapter 7, when the main character flashes back to a time when she visited her family in Fuzhou and spent an evening wandering the streets with her favorite cousin. We get a glimpse of family grievances on display when her father and his brother get into a fight. This chapter was beautifully written and truly transported me to a hot, sticky night in a foreign land. 

One of the low points, about 5 pages in an earlier chapter where we get an indepth tour of how a bible is produced. That chapter almost made me give up on this story. But the redeeming quality of chapter 7 reminded me about my personal compulsion: once I start a story, I have to finish it. Good or bad, I'm compelled to know how it ends. 

Of course, as endings go, the book leaves me hanging. Sure, our main character manages to extricate herself from one problem and find a sort of freedom in going it alone again. And then that's it. She just starts walking. In my mind I'm screaming, "And Then What!!!"  LOL

I have a love-hate relationship with books that leave me with unfinished business. I spend too many hours thinking about what the character would do next. If I were the author, where would I send them? If I were the character, what would I do?

And to her credit, Ms. Ma gives us ample opportunity to get to know Candace Chen. We know that she is capable, an inherent loner, and likes routine. Even without the author telling us, we know that she will find a place to settle, develop a routine for herself and create a new life. But, that doesn't mean I don't want specifics. 

Overall, the story is well done. We are given a female protagonist who has to live with some extremely unusual circumstances. And the real irony is the severance that she received that she never gets to spend.

I gave the story 3.5 stars because of the ending and because there were too many flashbacks into the main character's life. The synopsis on the cover led me to believe I was getting a story that was more about the dystopian world the characters were left in after the collapse of everything. Instead, I felt as though I spent more time living in the main character's personal dystopian lifestyle before society fell apart, because she wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life.