I loved Severance, so I’ll read anything by Ling Ma. I suppose I had high hopes for that reason, but these stories really didn’t do it for me.

There were three that I liked. ‘G’ reminded me of a more sinister toxic friendship-style Our Wives Under the Sea. ‘Peking Duck’ was the story I connected to most, about the narrator’s relationship with her mother after both immigrating away from their home country. These two stories were also the ones that seemed to have an ending!

‘Returning’ was longer than most, which follows the narrator visiting her husband’s home country, but gets abandoned by him at the airport. I liked this one right up until the end - it stops right at the climax with the sentence "We looked at each other." What? I found it, and all the other stories, deeply unsatisfying because they end just as the momentum is building up to something. They all followed the same pace: lots of little things happen slowly, then suddenly the plots picks up and you’re expecting some kind of resolution or development. But it just….ends. Very abruptly, in what feels like the middle of a paragraph.

To be honest, I felt like this kept being done to give the stories more depth. Because without that shock at the end, there wasn’t much else going on. The narratives were super vague. I didn’t understand what any of the stories were trying to say, apart from maybe two (G and Peking Duck). The narrator’s voice sounded the same in every story, they could have literally been the same character telling every one, but I know that wasn’t the intention. That was pretty much the only thing holding them all together.

I guess I have specific tastes when it comes to short story collections, and this just wasn't my thing. But I am looking forward to reading more full lengths novels from Ling Ma!