I devoured this after midnight in a Newark hotel. Great and, as others have noted, a necessary story in this moment. Not a dystopian novel — currently we’re only one heartbeat away from this reality. My only disappointment? I don’t think we’re going to get the complete Minervudottir biography. Spin-off?? ( )

Synopsis: The tale of 5 women struggling with different aspects of womanhood. This story is set in a world where laws are much more right leaning than present day America. It follows a woman in a historical setting who is an explorer, a woman going through fertility treatments, a unconventional healer, a teenager, and a struggling mother.

Rating
3 out of 5 stars

I expected to really love this book but unfortunately I didn't.

I thought the message of the book was interesting and the ideas presented were valuable but it is a very literary novel which made it semi inaccessible. The main character in each chapter is denoted by their role rather than a name. We only learn their names when other characters interact with them.

My favorite character was the one who was struggling with her fertility. I didn't really connect with the rest. I wasn't entirely sure what we were supposed to be learning from the explorer or the struggling mom. The healer was very odd. I assume she is meant to be neurodivergent but a few things about her character were really off putting to me. The teenager was the only other character I cared about.

I felt like the author had a lot to say about womanhood but I just felt like I wasn't getting a lot of her messaging.

I think this book could really work for people who are more used to literary works. This book could also create awesome discussions in a book group or class room. I just didn't enjoy it in my personal reading experience. ( )

Through the lives of four modern women and one forgotten explorer, Red Clocks examines what it means to be female in a patriarchal society, the struggle to control your own destiny as one, and the eternal accusations we face when we dare to breakaway from the social restrictions placed on us. This softly disturbing, near-future dystopia is so utterly contemporary in its feel and the single, devastating change to law so realistic that it leaves you unsettled as does the quiet sound in the night that you aren't quite sure you really heard but can't stop listening for. ( )

Red Clocks follows the lives of four women: the biographer, the wife, the mender, and the daughter shortly after a constitutional amendment has passed that has made abortion and IVF illegal and is about to make adoption by a single parent illegal as well.

While Red Clocks presumably focuses on the current "hot button" issue of abortion, for me this book provides more of a retrospective on the many ways in which women have been relegated, in times past, to a role of "less than" in society. The characterization of one woman (the mender) as a "witch" and another (the wife) as an unhappy housewife I believe to be examples of how women have been trapped and persecuted in the past. The biographer struggles with an all consuming desire to have a child while writing a book about a female polar explorer who is again, limited by pre-defined gender roles. There's an irony to the biographer's desire to be a mother as she writes a book about a woman trying to shake off the traditional female role in favor of exploration and adventure.

It's also interesting to look at the tension between the women themselves. The women intersect in interesting ways, torn between their own desires, judgements, and experiences and empathy for their fellow women. The biographer wants a child and the daughter is going to bear one, but the biographer can't decide whether to support the daughter's desire to end her pregnancy (illegally) or beg her to permit the biographer to adopt the baby. The wife, saddled with two fairly typical children and a stifling marriage of her own, judges the biographer for taking every available avenue to become pregnant. The mender is falsely accused by her lover; herself an abused wife. .

For me, all of this interplay was very interesting and the dystopian premise was probably the weakest part. The subtleties of the story where the true nature of feminism is revealed made the book more meaningful. I loved the structure and the writing itself. I think there is an underlying message here that we women are oftentimes our own worst enemies and not as united in our collective feminist drives as we might think we are.

The ending of the book is beautifully done - - a capstone on writing that felt fresh to me:

"She wants more than one thing."

Does that not summarize the entire truth of the female human experience in the most simple possible way? ( )

The hype on this book was pretty exciting. People were calling it the spiritual successor to The Handmaid’s Tale, so I was naturally excited. It was one of the Book of the Month selections the month after I had stopped subscribing to the service, so I knew it should be on my radar. After reading it, while I would not compare it to Handmaid’s, it is an incredible work of women’s lit on motherhood and loss.

The chapters are told from different perspectives and are named by what the woman represents- Daughter, Mother, Biographer, and Mender. What we know is abortion is illegal in the US and a new law is about to take effect requiring two (a man and a woman) to raise one child. It is sometime in the near future.

The Daughter has been having sex with a boy in her class who quickly moves on from her when he gets bored with her. He leaves her not knowing she is pregnant. The daughter does not want to keep the child and now must figure out what to do.

The Mother is the mother of two in a marriage which is failing. Her children continue to get on her nerves and are growing into this world where clearly males are in charge. She longs to get out of her family, but is completely stuck.

The Biographer is a teacher and a writer. She has been trying to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization and other methods, but is beginning to run out of time and money. The law is changing and if she does not get pregnant, she will be out of time to be a single mother. She longs to be a mom.

The Mender has been labeled the town witch. She performs natural abortions for those seeking her help. Recently, she has given a drink to induce labor to the local principal’s wife, who died shortly after she drank the tea. The Mender will have to fight for her life in a court which has banned any type of abortion.

As the story goes on, the 4 women’s lives will become intertwined with one another as they live their lives within this town.

There are parts of this book which are slow moving, but at the conclusion of the book, I found those parts to be more deliberately slow to draw out relationships or struggles within the women. Their characters become more and more alive as the story progresses and as the world becomes fuller. We see there are no easy answers or black and white answers within this world, even though the country has decided to make the abortion issue black or white.

As much as this is about motherhood and children, it is also very much about the loss of children/family. I will not give too much away as some of it lies in spoiler territory, but I can safely talk about the Biographer. She longs for motherhood and we see her heartbreak as her chances for such become slimmer and slimmer. She begins to get desperate and makes some questionable decisions. She is recognizing though that the family she longs for will not be, so she must wrestle with that loss of the child that never was.

This is overall an incredible book. I can see some being turned off by it because it approaches abortion directly and does not give a quick or easy answer. These women struggle and their world is very much against them, with the Mender, quite literally. There cannot be a happy ending for these women in this world and we recognize that from the very beginning of the book.

I gave this one 4 stars. ( )

I'm late to reading this novel, so late that I'm not certain it should be classified as dystopian, since the world described could become real any day now. Using multiple perspectives, the author presents very different women, different choices, and different desires, but shows how each is constrained by law and expectations. Often I felt like the author was seeking to describe what it's like to live in a woman's body at different stages of life. I identified with several of the women and especially with their experiences. This book was hard to read, but in the best way possible. ( )

In the US, a constitutional amendment has recently passed declaring any fertilized cell to have the full rights of a human being, meaning that anyone who gets or provides an abortion can and will be charged with murder. Another law is about to go into effect, too, preventing single parents from adopting, because "Every Child Needs Two." In this world, we meet four women: One who is desperate to have a child of her own. One who is being driven crazy by her life with her children and her might-as-well-be-a-child husband. One who gave her own baby up for adoption, and who now lives in the woods treating other women with herbs. And a teenage girl who finds herself accidentally pregnant.

I'll be honest, I was a bit leery of this book going in, thinking the odds were higher than I'd like that it'd either be a heavy-handed political screed (which aren't super enjoyable even when I very much agree with them) or an incredibly depressing dystopia (which I might find a little hard to handle these days). But I think it does avoid being either of those. The situation faced by women in this all-too-plausible world is infuriating -- at least, it is if you value reproductive rights, although I imagine the novel would be infuriating in entirely different ways if you think those laws sound like fantastic ideas -- but the novel itself isn't as bleak as I'd feared. And giving us the stories of four different women (or five, if you count the snippets from the biography one of the women is writing), all with very different experiences and desires and perspectives when it comes to their own reproduction, is a great way to explore things.

All that having been said, I still didn't love it, although I keep second-guessing the reasons why. One of them is that I had trouble getting along with the writing style. Zumas hit a major misstep for me almost immediately with the way that she refuses to use her character's names when writing in their POV. That, in itself, is a literary device that can be interesting, but in this case, it turned out that all the characters know each other and readily use each other's names, so it seemed to accomplish absolutely nothing other than keeping me confused, early on, about which names went with which POV characters and who was being talked about at any given moment. I may have started muttering to myself about stupid literary gimmicks and "yet another MFA type whose writing is so 'clever' it can't get out of its own way" or words to that effect. Which is maybe unfair, and I did more or less warm up to the writing eventually, but I think that initial reaction colored a lot of my response to the whole thing.

Also not helping was the fact that I found almost all of the characters annoying. Which is probably also unfair, Hell, the carefully calibrated surgical-strike awfulness of the most irritating character in the book -- the husband of the married POV character -- is actually a fairly impressive artistic accomplishment. And the women are supposed to be flawed, with their issues and capacity for pettiness and so on no doubt being very much part of the point. Women are complicated human beings, people are judgmental because no one ever fully understands another's POV, society's attitudes about women mess with everyone's head, and so on. I get it. And, again, it did work better for me as the novel went on. But as a reading experience, it didn't exactly thrill me. Although it did leave me asking myself uncomfortable and thought-provoking questions about my own ability to sympathize with women whose experiences and desires differ significantly from my own, which I think is probably a worthwhile result in itself.

Anyway. Can't say I entirely enjoyed it, for reasons that might well be as much my fault as the author's, but I certainly did appreciate aspects of it, and in the end I'm not sorry I read it, anyway. ( )

Red Clocks is scarier for me than The Handmaid's Tale (which I loved!), because it isn't a dystopian novel, set in the future with a different societal setup. It is so frighteningly close to now that I can almost touch it. The legal manipulations going on in Texas and other states concerning abortion and women's rights are just small steps beyond this book. I am incensed and petrified and we have to pay attention. NOW. ( )

Four present day women grapple with identity and reproduction. Gin is a healer who knows herbs. Mattie is a pregnant teen who wants her life and future. Susan is a wife and mother who loves her children but is overwhelmed by their demands and her husband's lack of engagement. Ro longs for a baby, but has no partner. Laws relating to abortion, family structures, and fetal rights all create complications for these women.

In a parallel, Ro is writing a biography of a female arctic explorer who also must find her own path.

The overlay of the various stories and the secondary characters around the women demonstrate the ongoing struggles for women in finding the balance between giving life and losing their own.

Keep Them Barefoot

Leni Zumas uses the Personhood Amendment as the impetus for her novel about the lives of four disparate women, plus a fictional 19th century historical figure, to illustrate in dramatic fashion the constraints under which many women struggle now and perhaps in the near future if certain zealots get their way. She further emphasizes her points by compartmentalizing these women by their primary roles: The Biographer, The Wife, The Daughter, and The Mender. The historical figure, an ambitious woman who doesn’t hew to the societal demands of her time, is simply a woman, itself, when you view the novel this way, a restrictive compartment.

The novel follows the lives of these women living in a small Oregon coastal fishing town, including how they interact with each other. The Biographer, Ro, researches and writes a biography of 19th century Arctic explorer Eivør Mínervudottir, teaches at the local high school, and tries via IVF to have a baby before her biological clock and a new law sounds expiration. The Wife, Susan, raises two children as she suffocates in her marriage to her teacher husband, who seems indifferent to her and certainly self-absorbed. The Daughter, Mattie, an adopted child, finds herself pregnant and desperate, as abortions have been outlawed and harming a fetus in anyway is a crime. The Mender, Gin, a young crone of sorts, lives in the woods, prefers the company of her animals to humans, and sells herbal remedies to townspeople. And Eivør forms something of an intermezzo between chapters not only adding a note of emphasis to the issues faced by the characters but also reminding us that severely restricting women to certain accepted roles has always been the norm.

These women prove complex, more expansive than their definitions, but also squarely within them as well. Ro nearly impoverishes herself trying to become pregnant but puts aside her desires to help, though not without much inner torment, Mattie resolve her unwanted pregnancy. Susan struggles to exit her marriage and builds up lots of resentment toward Ro, who she views as free, though Ro resents Susan partly because she has what Ro desires. Gin, for her part, can’t help but be involved with others in town, regardless of how much she wishes most to be left alone.

Hanging over all of them and affecting them in different ways is the Personhood Amendment, which steals control of their lives from them and imposes potentially severe punishments and restrictions upon them. This, for those not familiar, for in fact it is a real proposal pushed by some antiabortion groups, declares life begins at conception, triggering a whole laundry list of laws, among them murder for abortions, no contraception, and more. In the novel, this is coupled with it being illegal to go to Canada for an abortion, as you will be turned away, even arrested, at the “Pink Wall,” the requirement of two, a man and woman, as parents, and the impending end to IVF. Since all these currently don’t exist but could if some had their way, the novel has the flavor of a dystopian future.

Some may find the novel’s flow a bit disjointed and the writing a little showy, while others may not think it dystopian enough in the sense of being technologically removed from our time. But for others interested in how society works, and can work even harder, to mold women to limited expectations, the novel will resonate. ( )

Keep Them Barefoot

Leni Zumas uses the Personhood Amendment as the impetus for her novel about the lives of four disparate women, plus a fictional 19th century historical figure, to illustrate in dramatic fashion the constraints under which many women struggle now and perhaps in the near future if certain zealots get their way. She further emphasizes her points by compartmentalizing these women by their primary roles: The Biographer, The Wife, The Daughter, and The Mender. The historical figure, an ambitious woman who doesn’t hew to the societal demands of her time, is simply a woman, itself, when you view the novel this way, a restrictive compartment.

The novel follows the lives of these women living in a small Oregon coastal fishing town, including how they interact with each other. The Biographer, Ro, researches and writes a biography of 19th century Arctic explorer Eivør Mínervudottir, teaches at the local high school, and tries via IVF to have a baby before her biological clock and a new law sounds expiration. The Wife, Susan, raises two children as she suffocates in her marriage to her teacher husband, who seems indifferent to her and certainly self-absorbed. The Daughter, Mattie, an adopted child, finds herself pregnant and desperate, as abortions have been outlawed and harming a fetus in anyway is a crime. The Mender, Gin, a young crone of sorts, lives in the woods, prefers the company of her animals to humans, and sells herbal remedies to townspeople. And Eivør forms something of an intermezzo between chapters not only adding a note of emphasis to the issues faced by the characters but also reminding us that severely restricting women to certain accepted roles has always been the norm.

These women prove complex, more expansive than their definitions, but also squarely within them as well. Ro nearly impoverishes herself trying to become pregnant but puts aside her desires to help, though not without much inner torment, Mattie resolve her unwanted pregnancy. Susan struggles to exit her marriage and builds up lots of resentment toward Ro, who she views as free, though Ro resents Susan partly because she has what Ro desires. Gin, for her part, can’t help but be involved with others in town, regardless of how much she wishes most to be left alone.

Hanging over all of them and affecting them in different ways is the Personhood Amendment, which steals control of their lives from them and imposes potentially severe punishments and restrictions upon them. This, for those not familiar, for in fact it is a real proposal pushed by some antiabortion groups, declares life begins at conception, triggering a whole laundry list of laws, among them murder for abortions, no contraception, and more. In the novel, this is coupled with it being illegal to go to Canada for an abortion, as you will be turned away, even arrested, at the “Pink Wall,” the requirement of two, a man and woman, as parents, and the impending end to IVF. Since all these currently don’t exist but could if some had their way, the novel has the flavor of a dystopian future.

Some may find the novel’s flow a bit disjointed and the writing a little showy, while others may not think it dystopian enough in the sense of being technologically removed from our time. But for others interested in how society works, and can work even harder, to mold women to limited expectations, the novel will resonate. ( )

I'm struggling with the rating here - one one hand, it's a well-written novel examining the lives of 5 women (4, really) as they struggle with issues of motherhood and independence, and on the other, it feels like the political aspect was completely unnecessary and included because women's-rights-dystopian fiction is all the rage these days. If Zumas had simply left that part out, and had Ro simply unable to afford further insemination/IVF treatments and come up with some other reason she couldn't adopt, nothing truly essential to the novel would have changed. Susan would still have struggled in her marriage, Mattie would still have struggled with her decision to get an abortion, and Gin still would have been arrested on a trumped-up charge.

The good:
Interconnected narratives can get muddied and bloated very quickly, and Zumas handles her with a deft hand, making it clear how everyone is connected but not leaning on those connections or interweaving their arcs unnecessarily.

Ro's extreme struggle with her desire to be a mother and her desire to not be married/involved with anyone was extremely sympathetic, even if I couldn't relate. The pressure society put on women to marry and procreate is unique and inescapable, and we all deal with it in our own ways. Even once our decision is made and set in stone, if it's not an "acceptable" one, there will always be pushback.

Susan's story was incredibly touching and sympathetic.

The bad:
Ro's behavior was inexcusable when she learned of Mattie's pregnancy. Yes, she was under immense pressure and personal stress, but Mattie came to her for help because Ro had been such a fierce advocate against the anti-abortion laws, and for Ro to let her down so profoundly was... disappointing. Of course it makes sense that Ro would wonder if Mattie would give her the baby, but once Mattie already said no and made it clear she didn't want to continue the pregnancy, Ro should have backed off and done what she could to help, instead of trying to convince a young, vulnerable girl to change her mind. She was doing to Mattie exactly what everyone else was doing to her - questioning an already made decision and futilely attempting to change it.

Why didn't Gin give Mattie an abortion when Mattie came to her in the first place? That would have solved it all right there, but instead she lied about not having the ingredients. Gin, really, was the second most extraneous character - while she has her connection to Mattie, nothing she did really had an impact on the overall plot. She was arrested for attempted murder of a grown women, not necessarily the fact that she provides abortions. What effect, then, really, did she have on the plot?

Why didn't Yasmin go to Canada for her abortion? She was rich enough and it was still possible.

I enjoyed the small snippets of Eivør's story that we got, but she was even more extraneous than Gin. ( )

This is one of those books that makes me go "eh." In theory I should like it. The idea is simple (abortion and IVF is illegal)--but this isn't The Handmaid's Tale; life continues otherwise, boring and banal. THe stories of 4 (and snippets from a biography of another) wind together to describe this reality from different angles.

The writing is artfully choppy, a little too stylized, though the individual women's voices remain distinct. The relationships are depicted well. But I never got a sense of real urgency here. Zumas is so focused on how it plays out on a micro level that she willfully ignores the fact that there would be large scale political and social consequences to having a country where we can ratify an amendment banning abortion. We know that girls go to prison, that Mattie's best friend is there; but there's no emotion behind it and no wider impact. ( )

The five stories within the book feel disconnected and disjointed. It's written in a lyrical way but the multiple plots feel choppy. The cover draws you in but it stops there and at times it is difficult to follow the plot. Overall, a disappointing read. ( )

I mean, this was nearly a 5 star book. Maybe like 4.8 for me. Good pace, engrossing. I throughly enjoyed this book. I wanted more. ( )

While it does take a bit of time to get into it as it starts off a bit choppy and disjointed it is very satisfying as it all comes together and you figure out the relationships between all the women. ( )

Yes, there is a dystopian element to the setting of this novel, but it is not that far from our current reality, and I was not that taken aback with the way the characters dealt with it all.

What it means to be a woman - in 5 interconnected stories...

First and foremost, what it means to be a woman is to be identified by your role, rather than your person. Names exist, sure, but these characters are known by their roles in the community or their self-identified role in place of what might be handed to them by others.

Secondly, what it means to be a woman is to learn to accept that the role is your identity, and struggle either against it or lean into it. Usually, women find themselves doing both.

The Mender - The forest dwelling natural practitioner who knows how to blend solutions to any woman's needs. She comes from a broken background, wants to fix what she can, while still protecting her existence.

The Daughter - The "everyone's" daughter, which I loved. She has a relationship with the Mender and the Biographer, neither of whom are her daily maternal figure. She wants to stay young, needs to lean on others, faces the hardest aspects of this reality.

The Wife - The woman who gave up her independence to be a wife and mother of 2, who wants nothing more than some peace, some excitement, some relief. She tries to accept her role, but ultimately needs to be defined outside of her relationship to someone else. There is no true answer as to whether she succeeds, but she will try.

The Biographer - She isn't a Spinster - because that would give her no role in comparison to others. She isn't Teacher - because she doesn't yet have anything to teach. Instead, she is stuck in her notes, her revisions, her obsession with a woman she thinks has the answers about what it means to be an independent woman.

The Polar Explorer - Here is the true example of a woman who sets out to define herself on her own terms. And yet, she fails, because of her time, her space, her gender.. This lesson was perhaps the hardest for me to read, but the one that most provoked the spark of "Move." ( )

If you are going to try to be the successor to "The Handmaid's Tale" I want you to bring it.
"Red Clocks" a euphemism for a woman's womb or vagina (I don't know guys, I refuse to go back and read this again) talks about a different United States where 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. So synopsis sounded good and I went for this book. I got a somewhat incomprehensible book about four women (and one woman that one of the four is writing a biography about) that limps back and forth between them and then ends.

We have Zumas referring to the four characters as the following throughout her book: the Biographer (Ro), the Wife (Susan), the Mender (Gin) and the Daughter (Mattie).

I think Zumas wanted to designate these characters as what the world sees them at, but honestly in Gin's case the best name would have been "Witch" and Ro would have been "Spinster." So I don't know what she's doing with that. If there had only been three women in this story it would have been a nice call-back to the Maiden, Mother, and Crone.

The only story that I cared about was Mattie. One out of four is not good by the way.

Ro's story was focused on her trying to become artificially inseminated. I have no idea why the law would not have included this not being illegal if you freaking ban in-vitro fertilization, but I am not going to think too hard on it. Ro is also writing a biography on a female explorer called Eivør who lived in the 9th-century. I totally started skipping the sections in between chapters that were about her. I just could not at that point with everything else that was driving me up the wall about this book.

Susan is not happy in her marriage and seems to dislike one of her two kids. She wants her husband to go to counseling and he refuses, so she is in a bad stalemate in her marriage. This also led me to question if you are even allowed to divorce in this bold new world, but I guess so. She seems to be passive aggressive about everything and I just honestly wanted to yell at her to either leave your husband or suck it up.

Mattie is adopted and is pretty much the perfect daughter. When she finds herself pregnant, she's scared about what options are left to her. She does confide in Ro so there are some scenes between them, but that is way towards the end.

Gin leaves in the woods and women come to see her now for ailments. So that part was kind of interesting. If the U.S. reverses itself, would more mid-wives or others have to step forward to be there to deal with things for women again. But here story was all over the place for me.

The writing was tough to get past. The flow was awful. It would have helped if all of the women interacted, but they don't. Ro interacts with Susan and Mattie. Mattie interacts with Gin and Ro. The four of them I don't think have one scene together in this book.

The world building didn't really work for me since it left me with a ton of questions. Do I think in the United States we are coming ever closer to a woman's right to choose being restricted, yes. That scares me a lot. We know that somehow this act just randomly got passed. The Supreme Court said okay to this? Where were the mass protests? How the heck did in-vitro even get included with this?

Also the book goes into how single people would soon not be allowed to adopt because of a two parent requirement which also seems to be slamming those who are LGBT so that left me with wondering if that is illegal too?

But then later on Ro brings up protests happening that she is thinking about being a part of and I just wondered about what did the rest of the world say, what are others doing? We hear how one teen goes to jail or disappears essentially after being found out she had an abortion.

The book limps to the end and I was glad to be done with it. ( )

Sorry, SF fans, this one isn't SF no matter how it might be billed that way. There is ONE alteration to reality and it's only a legal one. Abortions are outlawed. The rest is, as they say, history.

Enter into a novel about vaginas. Names are missing because it's popular to write about real people as only their roles.

Other than that, it feels like popular fiction, complete with disgruntled housewives, teachers who dream of having children but are denied, little girls who get pregnant and must suffer all kinds of horrors in this realistic world of insanity. Just roll back the clock a little. Or roll it forward. Roe VS Wade is HISTORY.

All in all, this novel *is* a what-if. It says nothing more than what I already believe, that women should not have to suffer, either economically or legally or socially, for the desire NOT to be saddled with a real and true burden. Not unless they're able and willing to take care of said burden.

And yet, what makes this novel popular is the fear that this little freedom will soon go away. In real life.

Horrible? Yes.

It's a subject that should not be shot, burned, ostracized, locked-away, or otherwise relegated to dirty street corners with coat hangers.

As a novel, however, it's okay. I might have liked it better if the more fascinating Biographer had an actual name. A lot of the details of the characters' lives were more interesting than their Roles would have them be. Is it on purpose? Undoubtedly. Did it work the way it should have? Not sure, but I'm leaning toward no.

It wasn't bad tho and I support the attempt. ( )

Zumas creates women with lovely endearing individuality and humaneness. I was concerned for their welfare and wanted them to turn out to have happy lives, almost to the degree that I feel about characters in Kent Haruf's novels. On the downside the characters's story arcs were not particularly interesting and their reactions to menstrual-related events never strayed much beyond the obvious, with the exception of the mender, whom I adored. Too bad her dramatic arc was wrapped up in a B movie plot.

The person who designed this cover should get a medal. Brava--I'm assuming you are a woman--forgive me if you're not, and my admiration for you has grown all the more strong--and shame on Hachette for not giving you a named credit on the jacket you designed. ( )

The second half was better than the first half - I didn't think the "biographer" and "mender" (etc) titles were particularly effective, to the point where it was difficult to get to know the characters early on. Maybe it was supposed to help make them archetypes? Anyway, it was a good cautionary tale, my issues were mainly with style. ( )

Imagine a United States much like ours. Now make abortion illegal. Endow embryos with legal rights and personhood according to a Constitutional Amendment. Outlaw in-vitro fertilization because said embryos can't give consent to be transferred from lab to uterus. Set this alternate American story on the eve of the implementation of a law that states that only married couples can adopt because "Every Child Needs Two." This is the world that Leni Zumas has created in her novel, Red Clocks, a world quietly at war against women.

Four women in a small Oregon town, a history teacher (called The Biographer), an herbalist who lives alone in the woods (called The Mender), a pregnant teenager (called The Daughter), and a discontented stay at home mother (called The Wife) are all straining against society's definition of them. In the erasure of their identities, they are simply the embodiment of their roles rather than individual women who have hopes and dreams and complicated feelings. Naming them according to their roles strips them of their personhood much as the ever tightening laws about women do. But Zumas isn't consistent with their anonymity, allowing other characters to call the women by their names, which confuses matters. Ro, the history teacher, is single, in her forties, and cannot seem to conceive a biological child through IUI. Time is running out for her to adopt as the law restricting adoptions to married couples only is mere weeks away from becoming reality. As she struggles with the unfairness of her situation, especially in contrast to Susan (The Wife) who appears to have it all and pregnant teenager Mattie (The Daughter), she is also writing a biography of a little known, female Faroese polar explorer named Eivor Minervudottir who faced her own immense struggles against the ideas of men and their ideas of women's place in the world. Susan, the wife, has two children she loves but her marriage is unhappy and she feels and rejects the pressure to be the perfect wife, entirely eschewing cleaning and cooking a certain way and demanding some time to herself to escape her children and their constant needs. She keeps hoping that her husband will be the one to end their marriage because she dreads being seen to be the one who ruined everything. Mattie, the daughter, who is Ro's student and Susan's occasional babysitter, is fifteen and pregnant. She knows what happens to girls who seek abortions and are discovered but she doesn't care. She just doesn't want to be pregnant and she'll go to extreme lengths to find a way to terminate despite the fact that her own parents would never approve. Gin, the mender, is looked at askance in town, living as she does, out in the woods, supplying women with herbal healing concoctions. It is to Gin that Mattie first goes in her quest for an abortion. And it is Gin who is the thin skein of connection between the other three women. How this unkempt, witchy woman is connected to each of them gets revealed slowly throughout the novel as she herself comes under unwanted scrutiny and is placed at risk.

This could be a frightening view of our political future but it was actually more about society's defining of women's roles than it was about the laws that curtail their freedoms (although it is about some of that too), laws that aren't so far off in the imagination now. The four women, and Eivor the explorer too, must conform or be punished, must suffer quietly or be outcast, or be considered unnatural. The chapters alternated between each of the women and either a small fragment of Eivor's diary or Ro's biography of her (it's unclear which it is), showing how each woman chafed at her situation. The characters each showed a different face of what society expects of women but in doing so they became fairly stereotypical. If intentionally drawn to show they acquiesced to what was expected of them, Zumas has succeeded but this also meant they lacked the engaging emotional depth of more complex characters, which made the reader less interested in their stories. Their stories, individually or collectively, didn't feel as if they were the most important things here though anyway. Unfortunately the message of the novel took precedence over the plot. For as interesting as the premise was, once the reader got used to the staccato prose style and choppy narrative, this ended up being fairly pedestrian. Maybe that makes it all the scarier as a near future dystopia. That certainly seems to be true for many other readers; it just wasn't for me. ( )

I’m not sure why I bought this. I guess the blurb must have caught my fancy or something. Although that doesn’t seem right, because, well, “near-future dystopia”. I mean, who reads them anymore? With the actual shit that’s going down in Trump’s US and Brexit Britain, literary dystopias are starting to look like weak sauce. In Red Clocks, the Republican Christian nutjobs are firmly in charge, abortion is illegal, and only families of one father and one mother can adopt kids. Which is unfortunate for a couple of the characters in Red Clocks, a pregnant schoolgirl and a single teacher desperate for a child (and whose numerous tries at IVF have all been unsuccessful). Zumi chooses to tell her story from the viewpoints of each of her characters, but in their viewpoint chapters they’re not identified by name, only by their role in the story – so “the biographer”, “the wife”, and so on. It doesn’t work. It’s an unnecessary hurdle – although it does successfully disguise for at least the first quarter of the book quite how ordinary its story is. I was also annoyed by the attempt at found documents pertaining to the historical figure who is the subject of the biographer’s unfinished, er, biography, a female polar explorer from the turn of the twentieth century. She’s named Eivør Minurvasdottír – and the first time I saw it I thought, there’s no ø in Icelandic. But there is in Faroese. Which is where she’s from. But the accent on the surname is in the wrong place. It should be -dóttir. The name is misspelt throughout the novel. Didn’t the author check? Didn’t the editor? The publisher? It’s not like it’s hard to find out. It’s a minor complaint – and from someone who chiefly reads science fiction! But for all that Red Clocks was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the first time an Orwell Prize has been offered for fiction, there didn’t seem much to me that stood out. (The Orwell Prize is probably best remembered for giving an award to Johann Hari, only to demand it back when it transpired Hari had plagiarised and misrepresented facts in his articles. He returned the prize but has never returned the prize money.) But Red Clocks. Dull and unoriginal. Not worth reading. ( )

Read this thanks to a friend's strong recommendation and physical handoff. I'd stayed away from it when it first came out because it seemed like a bit of a Social Issue Flavor of the Week novel, but I'm so glad it was literally put in my hands because it was great. Really lively, solid writing, without the heavy-handed message I was dreading. That sounds like faint praise, and I don't mean it that way—rather that the story was interesting and nuanced and moral-free (other than the obvious thought that no one should legislate what women do with their bodies), and in fact a lot of fun to read. ( )

I came for the arctic exploration. At first I was charmed, like "oh, red clocks, I get it!" but that was the one and only bell this book rang.
This book made me want to reread "My Year of Meats" by Ruth Ozeki. ( )