Summary: A young woman struggles to survive in a society devastated by a contagion.
Rating & Recommendation: 5/5; recommend for lovers of satire
Review: I LOVED this. [baby sized spoilers ahead] I picked up this book because it was a pretty shade of pink. I opened this book because I kept hearing such good things. I dismissed the first few pages of this book because of the odd stylistic choices - there’s no quotation marks around the dialogue, and there’s about four different timelines. I kept reading this book because I found Ling Ma’s fixation on memory to be irresistible.
The main character - a workaholic millennial addicted to routine - doesn’t see the world literally crumbling around her as a fast moving disease wipes out most of the world’s population. The satire here is both in your face and terribly nuanced: the end of the world is brought on by a fever epidemic that renders its victims unconscious, stuck in an endless loop of their routine days until they wither away and die...
YOU GET HER POINT RIGHT? We’re all going through the motions just to survive, until eventually our motions kill us! The struggle to survive is just a struggle to recreate old habits, revisit old memories, rehash old wounds. We continue to work jobs we don’t like, to spend time with people who don’t enrich us or elevate us, to contribute to grand machines that don’t serve us. If we strip everything back and distill ourselves down to the barest, basest things, what have we got left, other than our memories? Does revisiting them - reliving and reviving our tired routines - make us weak? Is survival being able to sever our ties to our pasts, to our comfort, to the sentimental? Does that make us strong?
I was floored at how much I enjoyed this book and how sad I was when it was over. If you’ve got a peculiar sense of humor and you can laugh at yourself, you might enjoy this one.
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