Severance

Firstly, what the hell was that ending?! I was expecting more closure, and was in fact waiting for the next chapter on my audiobook and then... it ended??? WHAT.

Overall I felt like this ending summed up my feelings about this whole book. It felt like it was going somewhere but I couldn't really quite figure out where, and just kinda meandered a lot. It was engaging but at the same time the pacing could've been much tighter.

There were definitely a lot of messages here that was interesting and at least I felt like it was fairly cohesive, but at the same time... it didn't feel impactful enough for me. I liked what it was saying about late-stage capitalism and expected that to tie in somehow with the origin/mechanism of Shen Fever but... it didn't. I wanted it to talk more about some very interesting ideas it brought up, like how the glossy designer labels are all manufactured in third-world countries! While the book wasn't too disjointed and was somewhat coherent in that I can definitely see a motif critiquing capitalism but I just had trouble figuring out what the whole post-apocalyptic situation was for and why Candace had to be pregnant and all that. I was left feeling like I was teased for something more interesting than it really was.

The plot itself was pretty engaging but yet I found myself wishing it would hurry up. The pacing could've been a lot tighter. I only took 3 days to read it but somehow it felt like forever and I was wondering why I was spending so long reading this book. When I was reading it, it was engaging and I found myself trying to form theories on what the author wanted to say through these plot and thematic devices used. All in all I feel like there was a lot of good stuff here but it wasn't tied together very well and I wasn't left feeling like I learnt anything new here.

Also, Shen Fever was eerily prescient about the Covid pandemic, even more so than Station Eleven was.