SEVERANCE by Ling Ma

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire.

In spite of the official plot description insisting on how hilarious this book is, and is a satire, I found it neither.  I found it to be a fairly traditional tale of a mid range office worker in Manhattan, who continues on in her routines long after everyone else has left the city as a way of coping with the horrifying reality confronting her.

The group of survivors who find themselves traveling with the strange Bob are examples of how people in stress will follow whomever sets him/herself up as a leader who knows what he or she is doing.  Candace is found by the group unconscious in a vehicle far outside the city, and they take her in.  She is immediately wary and suspicious of the leader, but is ill and has no other means to travel, so stays on what she considers to be a temporary basis.

Although it ends on what might be considered a hopeful note, for me, it was just another ‘this will not end well’ scenario, as perhaps all post apocalyptic scenarios must end.

ZONE ONE by Colson Whitehead

In this post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead.

Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street—aka Zone One—but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety—the “malfunctioning” stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives.

Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world.

And then things start to go wrong.

Whitehead is a master of the dense sentence. and also at creating descriptive arabesques of imaginative digression: speculations about characters that do not exist in the novel as such, but are representative of a type of person who might still be existing in this post-infestation world and what that type of person might be doing, thinking.

This is both not at all a zombie book and the purest zombie book.  Zone One is really an elegy for the modern world. Marc Spitz and his comrades reminisce frequently about the good old days, the days before “Last Night,” the night when all hell broke loose, literally. Marc Spitz says he misses all the same things that everyone missed — “the free wifi” and whatnot — and there’s the sense that this is what he misses, the conveniences of life.

As you read, you begin to gradually get the feeling that there can be no good ending to this, that nothing will end well.

Written 2011, I guess it was in the middle, or maybe the ending of the zombie book storyline era.  While I can see the point of post apocalyptic books. as warnings and jeremiads of the failings of our modern world, I see zombie stories as something else altogether.  I think for zombie story writers, zombies are a metaphor for something …. not sure what exactly.  Something dead and rotten but still walking around?  Something that is only a skeleton of its former existence?  A mindless continuance of existence albeit in a useless and destructive form?  I don’t know, maybe the symbolism is different for each author.  But I cannot experience a zombie story book at face value.  I cannot accept that there are zombies, or vampires, or any of the other horrors given form and substance by writers.  I feel they must stand for something.  Right?

 

GROWING SEASON by Melanie Lageschulte

Melinda Foster is already at a turning point when the “for rent” sign beckons her down a dusty gravel road. Facing forty and downsized from her copywriting job at a Twin Cities ad agency, Melinda is struggling to find her way forward when a phone call brings her home to rural Iowa. It’s not long before Melinda is living in a faded farmhouse, caring for a barn full of animals, and working at her family’s hardware store in the community of Prosper, whose motto is “The Great Little Town That Didn’t.” And just like the vast garden she tends under the summer sun, Melinda soon begins to thrive. Filled with memorable characters, from a big-hearted farm dog to the weather-obsessed owner of the local co-op, “Growing Season” celebrates the challenges and joys of rural life. 

Yep.  The very definition of women’s lit, cozy fiction.

It is a pleasant story with the trope of leaving-the-big-city-behind-and-start-again-in-the-countryside-while-bonding-with-nature-and-a-small-town-community.  All that is missing is the handsome, appropriate aged, single male neighbor.  Since this is touted as the first in a heart-warming rural fiction series, I am sure he will appear in subsequent volumes.    That’s all you need to know.

 

EVERYBODY’S FOOL by Richard Russo

OK, yeah, I just love Russo’s books.  This one is a sequel to Nobody’s Fool, which I read before I started the blog, so I have no review of it here.  However, if you enter Richard Russo in the blog search window, you will find entries on two other of his books.

This book returns us  to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters from Nobody’s Fool

The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it’s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years … the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends … Sully’s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who’s obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might’ve been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident … Bath’s mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing … and then there’s Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there’s Charice Bond – a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer’s office – as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.

This story is a lot like the author’s Empire Falls. This one is set in a declining blue collar town in upstate New York instead of Maine, but we have a lot of down-and-out folks and a lot of the action occurs in a diner or in bars.  The story is kind of catalog of how hard-scrabble folks look at their lives and deal with the bad cards they keep getting.  It’s about love, loss, remorse, and hope in equal measure,

I sure did love it.

 

RAILROAD MAN by Alle Wells

Railroad Man tells a realistic story of railroad man Mickey MacDonald and spans a period of over 50 years of his life.  immerses us in a time in history when life was hard and people had to be tough to survive.  It’s 1933 and Mickey MacDonald is one of the lucky ones, having secured a job with the railroad when so many people are out of work. Mickey is riding high; he’s young and has his whole life ahead of him. But when he’s told he can’t marry the girl he’s loved since childhood, he begins heading down the wrong road which leads him to unhappiness.  He gets involved with  a strange young naive, uneducated girl, knocks her up, and is forced to marry her.    The rest of the story is how he deals with this woman over his lifetime, and what becomes of the girl he wanted to marry.

Not a terribly original idea, being a ‘you made your bed, now you have to lie in it’ kind of trajectory.  There was almost nothing about the railroad, trains, or working conditions, etc, so I found that a bit disappointing.  It was just basically a story of a relationship.  The guy could have had any occupation;  being a railroad worker was really incidental to the story.   There are a million stories in the Naked City, and this is just one of them.

PERIGEE by Patrick Chiles

Stranded in orbit, with no way home before the air runs out…

A veteran pilot flying a revolutionary spaceplane,

A media mogul on an urgent mission halfway around the world,

And an aerospace legend fighting to save his legacy, in the face of a government that would stand aside to let it be destroyed.

At hypersonic speed, Arthur Hammond’s fleet of Clipper spaceplanes has become the premium choice for high-flying travel, placing every corner of the globe within a few hours’ reach. But when the line’s flagship is marooned in space with a load of VIP clients, its crew must fight to stay alive knowing that help may never arrive.

As they struggle with failing life support and increasingly desperate passengers, their colleagues back on Earth scramble to mount an audacious rescue. A contentious mix of old airline hands and NASA veterans, they will face shocking betrayals in a battle to save their friends.

In this race against time, Hammond must confront an onslaught of horrendous press, nitpicking bureaucrats, and dubious financiers – all of them pawns in a larger game, with his business empire as the prize. Amid a spreading web of industrial espionage, he may find the truth to be worse than imagined.

And in space, one man will discover that escape may demand a terrible sacrifice.

In spite of the excited tone of the official plot description, I was disappointed to discover that all of the drama comes from sabotage of the equipment because of political issues.  Pfffft.  Boring.  I mean, every little thing went wrong.  Just too over the top for me.

 

THE LOVE WIFE by Gish Jen

A barbed, moving, and stylistically dazzling new novel about the elusive nature of kinship. The Wongs describe themselves as a “half half” family, but the actual fractions are more complicated, given Carnegie’s Chinese heritage, his wife Blondie’s WASP background, and the various ethnic permutations of their adopted and biological children. Into this new American family comes a volatile new member.Her name is Lanlan. She is Carnegie’s Mainland Chinese relative, a tough, surprisingly lovely survivor of the Cultural Revolution, who comes courtesy of Carnegie’s mother’s will. Is Lanlan a very good nanny, a heartless climber, or a posthumous gift from a formidable mother who never stopped wanting her son to marry a nice Chinese girl? Rich in insight, buoyed by humor, The Love Wife is a hugely satisfying work.

The story is dominated by the pidgin English speaking, passive-aggressive, iron-willed manipulating mother of Carnegie.  After her death from Alzheimer’s, Carnegie, through a distant relative in China, discovers her will, which requests he bring over Lanlan, a middle-aged Chinese woman who has had a terrible life. Lanlan is to serve as nanny to the children.

One reviewer writes “the characters alternate in telling the reader the story, almost as if they are being interviewed. However, the plot takes some rapid and crazy turns at about chapter 14, and the book never recovers. Whole characters (Gabriela, Blondie’s New Age, midlife crisis friend; the Bailey family) are left with no resolution. I feel like Gish Jen was going for something too big here, a swing and a miss.”

I agree with this reviewer, for the most part.  Basically, it is the story of a wildly mismatched couple who adopt two Asian girls, and then have a biological child, the husband always trying to escape the demands of his domineering mother, and the husband’s trite midlife crisis.  I enjoyed it, but it was not a homerun, so to speak.

THE JUDAS SYNDROME by Michael Poeltl

In a world devastated by an apocalyptic event, the bonds of friendship are tested in the haze of unrelenting depression, and paranoia.  Will you know who your friends are? The Judas Syndrome is a frightening portrait of a possible future end.

Joel and his friends are on the verge of graduation and excited and optimistic about their futures. But when they return from a camping trip in the remote woodlands to find themselves faced with a post-apocalyptic world, their daily lives acquire burdens and terrors hitherto unexperienced.

The Judas Syndrome is an unforgettable portrait of survival against the odds. Joel, the protagonist, is a troubled youth whose dreams of entering college in the fall have disintegrated with the rest of the civilized world. Experiencing a barrage of sinister premonitions prior to a camping trip, Joel struggles to shrug them off as nothing more than anxiety over the newest cyber-terror, the Grimm Reaper. For months the Reaper has been inundating the airwaves with threats of mass destruction if world governments do not adhere to his plethora of ridiculous demands. Finally, he does more than just threaten.

The deed done, the Reaper’s threats now realized, Joel and his small band of friends find themselves alone in a dying world. Their families are all dead and gone, and Joel’s family home is now their stronghold. Faith and faithlessness are investigated as his ongoing visions prepare Joel for the realization that the worst is far from over. Prisoners to a darkened sky and toxic earth, the group fights to survive. Through battles staged on their hallowed ground, through loss and victory, the group meets the Pilate to their Judas, unwittingly setting in motion- the Judas Syndrome. 

Not a bad post apocalyptic story.  Almost an ‘everybody dies in the end’ book, but not quite.  Enough ‘not quite’ so that there are two more sequels.  But one is enough for me.

 

CIRKUS by Patti Frazee

In Patti Frazee’s astonishing debut novel, enchantment and illusion casually commingle with reality as the Borefsky Brothers Circus makes its way across the American Midwest in the summer of 1900.

Mariana, the fortune teller, makes herself invisible and drifts through the nighttime circus, listening in on conversations and watching over her beloved Shanghai, a fire-breathing dwarf who closely guards his secrets, even from Mariana’s second sight. Conjoined twins Atasha and Anna cling to each other and weep for their home and for their mother and father who sold them to the circus. Jakub, the circus manager and husband to Mariana, fears his wife’s gifts, grieves his own failures, and drinks to forget it all. The stories and closely guarded histories of the troupe of performers dance around each other until a love affair between Shanghai and Atasha destroys the delicate balance.

As secrets are revealed and old wounds are opened, the consequences are unbearable to some and liberating to others. Lyrically graceful and populated by vividly drawn characters, Cirkus is a haunting novel of devastating heartbreak and exquisite loveliness.

OK, it is about a dwarf, a gypsy fortune teller, conjoined twin teenage girls, all in one of those turn of the century (twentieth century) small traveling circuses that plied the rural areas of the USA, as well as Europe.  It is a story about the trials and tribulations of side show “freaks” and other nomadic circus personnel. mostly of Czech origin, as they travel around the midwestern US entertaining the “rubes” and trying to deal with each other. It is full of  melodramatic romance plots of unrequited love, frustrated passion and star crossed lovers.

Hard to pigeonhole it as to genre, but I would say fantasy, quasi-historical fiction, where dreams have a reality of their own, and it is all a bit surreal.

I enjoyed it, although the first half was a bit slow.  But the last quarter was a toboggan ride, that’s for sure!

 

 

 

THE DANGEROUS EDGE OF THINGS by Tina Whittle

Tai Randolph is still adjusting to a newly inherited Confederate-themed gun shop when she gets a big shock: a murdered corpse in her brother’s driveway. Worse, her respectable sibling has fled to the Bahamas, leaving her to deal with the homicide and questions from the Atlanta PD. Complicating her plan to clear the family name is Trey Seaver, field agent for an exclusive corporate security firm hired to investigate the crime. Trey, recovering from a car accident that left him cognitively and emotionally damaged, is fearless, focused, and – to Tai’s dismay – utterly impervious to bribes, threats, and clever deceptions.

Tai’s investigations lead from the cold-eyed glamour of Atlanta’s adult entertainment scene to the gilded treachery of Tuxedo Road. Potential suspects abound. But it takes another murder – and threats to her own life – to make her realize that to solve this crime, she has to trust the most dangerous man she’s ever met.

This is the first in a six book series, and I gotta say, I really enjoyed it.  The writing style, the characters, and the plot just did it for me.  Hard to say exactly why, but I found it a fun read, not noir but yet not cozy either.  Well, done, Ms Whittle.