When Candance is the only one left, still holding onto the old world in an abandoned Manhattan populated only by the fevered, forever trapped in their memories and enacting them back to back until starvation and death, she realizes that she must accept this new world and move on. Or, conversely, it has always just been the end. It hardly seems like the beginning of the end. It’s like any other day – fashion jokes about face masks and demanding phone calls and dodging calls from the boyfriend she has lost. But conscious gets you nowhere in business.Īs her daily routine plods during the elongating summer days, she argues with her dreamer boyfriend in his basement apartment, prepares for a break-up, and keeps going into work as her company begins to issue face masks and warnings and hire contractors to sanitize the offices. She wants the art department, yet her conscious twinges during her visits to China, her long distance phone calls, the demands of her company and industry that no matter what, she get the closing factories to produce more at any cost to the workers. The upwardly mobile Candace wants to move out of the Bible department with its demanding producers, cheap paper, and lack of originality. But, as Chinese factories (read sweatshops) start closing, it becomes increasingly more difficult to make production deadlines. She is mostly focused on her day job in publishing though, specifically in getting the Gem Stone Bible off the presses and into the store. Ma’s self-focused, oblivious heroine, Candance Chen, a second-generation Chinese immigrant, is vaguely aware of Shen Fever.

Severance book review