They aren’t quite “undead,” so it’s more than a little mystifying how they can continue on for months without food or water, but once a reader overcomes this quibble, the novel becomes a genuine page-turner. In this particular version of zombie-ism, the victims are gripped by a fever that makes them perform the same rote tasks over and over until they expire. However, the closer narrator Candace Chen gets to the present, the more compelling the novel becomes. As she cuts back and forth in time, the strand about being a young Chinese-American woman living and working in New York during the first decade of the new millennium feels far more authentic, if somewhat lacking in narrative propulsion. Initially, Ling Ma’s debut novel Severance feels like two separate books: a not entirely original take on the zombie apocalypse, and an immigrant coming-of-age story.
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