Solitaire Book Club: Severance

 Severance by Ling Ma. If you mashed together SylviaPlath's The Bell Jar, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, and Steven King's The Stand, you might get something like Ling Ma's novel about a millennial New Yorker trying to come to grips with career choices (or lack thereof), romance (or what passes for it), family relations, and her Chinese heritage, all while being swept along in a growing - and eerily macabre - global pandemic. The narrative alternates between pre- and post-apocalyptic settings, juxtaposing "normal" life with the new world disorder, throwing differences - and similarities - into harsh relief. In these Days of Covid, the book (from 2018) seems positively prescient in its depiction of pandemic conditions and response. A great read.

One quibble: what is it with modern authors eschewing the use of quotation marks to identify dialog? C'mon, they're not that complicated, and they do help. I blame Frank McCourt...