Leni Zumas

FIVE WOMEN. ONE QUESTION: What is a woman for? In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling homeopath, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt. RED CLOCKS is at once a riveting drama whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. With the verve of Naomi Alderman's THE POWER and the prescient brilliance of THE HANDMAID'S TALE, Leni Zumas' incredible new novel is fierce, fearless and frighteningly plausible.

Red Clocks

A National Bestseller A New York Times Editor's Choice A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year An Amazon Best Book of the Month An Indie Next Pick One of Wall Street Journal's Twelve Books to Read This Winter An Esquire most anticipated book of 2018 An Elle Best Book of Winter A Popsugar most anticipated book of Fall A Ploughshares most anticipated book of Fall A Nylon Best Book of the Month One of Publishers Weekly's most anticipated titles of Fall 2017 Five women. One question. What is a woman for? In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivør, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt. RED CLOCKS is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, Leni Zumas fearlessly explores the contours of female experience, evoking THE HANDMAID'S TALE for a new millennium. This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous-even frightening-times.

A Novel

Heather Margaret

I really, really, REALLY, wanted to like this book but the writing felt too dull, too cheap, too short for the storylines that were presented. I guess I just wanted more emotions from the characters, everything seemed to fall flat for me.

Matt Stein

My review: https://mattstein.com/books/red-clocks

‘Intense, beautifully crafted . . . Her talent is electric. Get ready for a shock’ Guardian This is a work of fiction. Keep telling yourself that.

jillian tenner

Tempted to give a higher review and I think this may be the most meaningful book I’ve read in so long. The writing is so good and made me both love and truly hate characters, and the books topic is strong and tough and important, and is then equal parts difficult to get through and impossible to put down. Idk I think everyone should read this

Anna Campbell

** spoiler alert **
           An interesting book about women, desire, unhappiness, pregnancy and all the struggles that surround it. Very different from most books I’ve read lately, and very honest.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

I’ve seen this marketed as dystopian literature but the terrifying, infuriating thing is that it barely qualifies as speculative. In fact it feels closer than ever after the Kavanagh debacle in the United States and the responses to it.
In Zumas’s upsettingly plausible world women have lost their reproductive rights, both abortion and IVF have been outlawed and the nuclear has been legislated into superiority. It’s a different of extent rather than kind, after all there is plenty of legislation existing that prioritises the rights of “traditional” family structures. Red Clocks is our world; it only needs to tip a little.
The red clocks are the wombs of the four main characters, wombs which society has decided define their roles and their purpose as women. Roberta is single teacher desperate for a child but thwarted by Every Child Needs Two [Parents] legislation and failing artificial insemination. Teenage Mattie is terrified and trapped by her unwanted pregnancy. Gin the witch and healer finds her self-imposed isolation under threat and Susan who feels stifled by the monotony of wife and mother roles
.
The story comes together slowly as we learn the characters and how their lives are defined by their roles, sometimes these are defined by their relationships to others “wife”, “daughter” but even those personally chosen – mender , biographer – can trap and restrain because so many choices are curtailed, legally and socially, by the very fact of their being women.
The influence of the Handmaid's Tale is undeniable (and unavoidable) but what sets it apart from many other Atwood-esque novels is that the quality of the concept is matched by the quality of the writing. The dialogue is excellent and the complex but fluent structure allows the reader to see each character from inside and outside as their lives intersect. The plot is a slow-burn and there is plenty of tension but the story is character-driven. The well-rounded women are allowed to be selfish, judgemental and contradictory, to idealise choice while internally disapproving of the individual choices of others. No women's role is derided by Zumas. Her demand is a woman's right to choose and that every freely-made choice be valued.

It’s clever, it’s angry, it’s nuanced. Each of these women wrestles with choices made, avoided and forbidden; they often conflict and that’s the point. It’s all about wanting and wanting to choose and being free to want more than one thing.

Metal shadowhunter 

3.5/5
Upon my second reading, I have to admit my initial review judged it too harshly. Of course this book has its flaws, which book doesn't? However, the descriptive prose and interweaving of 5 stories made it worth the read

Casie Blevins

Alyssa Jacunski

I felt this was predictable and I didn’t care for the style of writing.

Halsted Mencotti Bernard

In near-future America, the Personhood Amendment has granted legal rights to unborn embryos, thus outlawing abortion and IVF. Also, the "Every Child Needs Two" Act is about to pass, preventing unmarried people from adopting. It sets the scene for a fascinating intersection of five women's lives -- four in the present, and one a century earlier -- that has a David Mitchell-esque feel to the plot structure and tone. I enjoyed it immensely while being horrified by how plausible this dystopian vision is.

Jessie G

2.5

I really wanted to like this book. There was very little payoff for the plot. I wanted better for the women of this book than they were given on the end.

 Bruna Acioly Leão

It's rare that a book will speak equally to my brain and my heart.

Red Clocks begins with a simple premise, which might seem like a dystopian to some, the beginning of what eventually happens in The Handmaid's Tale; but is actually both a reality in some developing countries and quite possible to happen in countries in which conservative men have risen to power (ahem!): abortion is illegal, in vitro insemination is illegal and in the works is coming a law that will make single parent adoptive families illegal. To people from the USA, it might seem awful, but I must say that some of these are realities in many other countries. Abortion is illegal in Brazil (though a few exceptions are sometimes granted: to save the mother's life or in case of rape and in some cases of embryo deformity not compatible with life) and many Latin American countries, as well as most of Africa and Asia have those restrictions. In some countries (though they are a minority), it is illegal without exception. So, yeah, not such a crazy reality to imagine, so this book feels much more contemporary than dystopian to me.

With this premise, the book chronicles a slice of life of five women: The Biographer (Ro Stephens) who really wants to have a baby but can't and divides her time between this now obsession, her life as a high school history teacher and writing the biography of an obscure female polar explorer (The Explorer - Eivor Minervudottir) from the 19th century, whose discoveries had to be published under the name of a man because no-one would believe a female would have made this kind of scientific contribution.

She is submitting her area to all kinds of invasion without understanding a fraction of what's being done to it 

The Mender (Gin Percival) is the local witch, though she is not exactly a with, but simply someone who prefers to live away from human company and who understands the laws of nature and knows how to manipulate them in a way that might seem magical but it is really a form of science. The Mender helps women who need solutions society won't give them. 

On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. "But when does it stop?" "Never," said her aunt. "It's perpetual, though impermanent."

The Daughter (Mattie Quarles), who is adopted by a loving (though conservative) pair of elderly parents, finds herself pregnant and with no desire to carry on the pregnancy. The child feels like an invasion on her body, of which she wishes to get rid of. 

 Sixteen years ago abortion was legal in every state. Why did she spend nine months growing the daughter if she was just going to give her up?

The Wife (Susan Korsmo) who has two kids, isn't affected by any of those laws, but is unhappy in her married life with no other perspective other than staying married. That makes her bitter towards other women, who seemingly have both better and worse than she does at the same time.

 How do you help a cinder, half-alive? Run over it fast to stop the burning. 

The books switches between these four perspectives (with bits about the explorer contained in the biographer's book), in a form of experimental writing. I realized it might not be for everyone. The chronology is not linear and the writing itself is not straight forward. For me, those were the things that made this book. I also, for some reason connected with each of the characters, rooted for them, felt their pain and felt them were real and alive and their sufferings were both strange and familiar at once. Other than that, the plot kept me interested, there were plenty of moments in which you make connections between the lives of the different characters, which were very satisfying.
I kept wanting to read it on and on, and that is always amazing.

Like I said at the beginning, this book spoke to my heart, which craves this empathy for characters and a plot that keeps you interested the whole way through. It's not plot heavy, there are some high stakes, but it is really more a "slice-of-life" kind of story, which I did enjoy, though I don't always. It also spoked to my brain, because the writing was well crafted, the discussions it rises were poignant.

I would have to recommend this book for discussion purposes, for people who are unsure whether they support abortion or unsure if they are feminists. Or if you already sure, this will inflame you with much needed desire to "not just shake your head, but do something about it" to paraphrase the book's words. 

A note: this book does not address how these laws would affect homosexual or otherwise non-binary people and couples, which I felt it was both a missed opportunity and a very big slight, because those realities and stories are equally important.

To quit shrinking life to a checked box, a calendar square. To quit shaking her head. (...) To be okay with not knowing. (...) To see what is. And to see what is possible.

Red Clocks

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