Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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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 […]

The dangerous lull of monotony

Severance by Ling Ma

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In what seems to be a theme for me, this is a book about existing in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ravaged world. Thankfully, as part of this book being heaps and oodles better than The Twleve, it is not only a more well-considered and well-written book, when women’s biology is addressed it’s much less exploitative. Having a female author helps with that. Let me back up. Severance centers on a millennial woman named Candace. She works at a publishing house in New York, has an apartment in Brooklyn, and […]

A Severance Package at the End of the World

Severance by Ling Ma

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I love a good post apocalypse novel, even though I am totally afraid of a massive disaster, like a plague, or meteor, or worldwide economic meltdown. This is why reading these types of novels is fun for me. Severance was actually a plague based disaster novel, with a little bit of cult obsession and passive zombies added in to keep things interesting. The novel focuses on Candace, a disillusioned New Yorker who somehow manages to survive the “fever” that swept across the globe. We switch […]



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