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3.71 AVERAGE
3.71 AVERAGE
This book ripped apart my life a little as I read it. Have me much to think about and all the feelings. An important read.
A gripping glimpse at a modern day America, just 15 minutes into the future. The stop between here and Gilead. Abortion is now murder, in vitro is banned, and soon adoption will be available only to heterosexual married couples. This novel beautifully weaves together how these new realities affect the lives of five different women in a small town in Oregon.
A gripping glimpse at a modern day America, just 15 minutes into the future. The stop between here and Gilead. Abortion is now murder, in vitro is banned, and soon adoption will be available only to heterosexual married couples. This novel beautifully weaves together how these new realities affect the lives of five different women in a small town in Oregon.
I picked this book blindly from the library on a bookshelf feature where they just showed you the first sentence of the book. This one reads, “In a room for women whose bodies are broken, the biographer waits her turn.” It immediately hooked me, and turned out to be “Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas.
The premise is that abortion is illegal, in vitro fertilization has been banned, and there is a “personhood amendment” that grants rights to embryos. It follows the story of five women and how being a woman/being a life-bearing creature affects your life’s trajectory. This was book 65/100 toward my reading challenge, and I highly recommend it.
The premise is that abortion is illegal, in vitro fertilization has been banned, and there is a “personhood amendment” that grants rights to embryos. It follows the story of five women and how being a woman/being a life-bearing creature affects your life’s trajectory. This was book 65/100 toward my reading challenge, and I highly recommend it.
I’ve been meaning to read this forever, and I’m glad I finally did. Not Gilead, but scarier because their United States is ours. It took me a minute to find my footing while reading, but I really enjoyed it.
(Probably more like 3.5 stars) I didn't have any problem relating or feeling for the characters, but I kept waiting for more to be explained, but it never happened. And then the book just...ended. I enjoyed reading it, found it entertaining, but I wish there had been a little more world development or a more satisfying ending.
Read this right after Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, and my goodness, it was 1000 times better! I really enjoyed this story following three women and one girl muddling their way through life in a new dystopian America.
see this review and others here: http://www.shelfstalker.net/blog/red-clocks-leni-zumas
This is a stunning debut—multilayered with characters who have unique voices, strong desires, and each their own arc through the story. It is a very realistically written book, both in the characters and setting, which feels eerily too close to home.
The new Personhood Amendment grants all liberties and rights to every embryo. A small, sleepy, rainy fishing town in Oregon hosts the four main voices of this book: the biographer, the daughter, the wife, and the mender, all women who are on their own journeys through understanding these new laws and dealing with challenges that women have always faced: motherhood—whether wanted or not, persecution for lifestyle, accepted gender roles, and their own pursuits of life, freedom, and happiness in the face of social or political objection.
There is also a fifth voice of the novel, a little-known polar-ice explorer, who the biographer has been trying to write a book about. She gets a small section between each chapter, usually beautifully poetic, often with crossed out words, and I loved these interludes into a story of strength and resilience filtered through the mind of the biographer at work.
Even though there is a dystopian near-future setting for this book, it is not the ruling force, unlike so many of these highly popular stylized novels today. Rather it is the characters who run the show and we see them living their lives as completely normal people, some influenced by the changes in the laws more than others.
What is more interesting is to see them each grow as people, independently choosing their own paths to find out who they are and what they want, despite what society (which could mean their own community, or the world at large, depending) thinks of them. Each one is such a strong example of how you can overcome restrictions to get what you want, or change your path in life to move toward a better life.
No matter what your views may be on abortion—that really isn't the point of this book. Zumas has dug into the lives of normal women and found resiliency, strength, and a desire to change their own lives.
Isn't that what we all want?
My thanks to Little Brown for my finished copy of this book.
This is a stunning debut—multilayered with characters who have unique voices, strong desires, and each their own arc through the story. It is a very realistically written book, both in the characters and setting, which feels eerily too close to home.
The new Personhood Amendment grants all liberties and rights to every embryo. A small, sleepy, rainy fishing town in Oregon hosts the four main voices of this book: the biographer, the daughter, the wife, and the mender, all women who are on their own journeys through understanding these new laws and dealing with challenges that women have always faced: motherhood—whether wanted or not, persecution for lifestyle, accepted gender roles, and their own pursuits of life, freedom, and happiness in the face of social or political objection.
There is also a fifth voice of the novel, a little-known polar-ice explorer, who the biographer has been trying to write a book about. She gets a small section between each chapter, usually beautifully poetic, often with crossed out words, and I loved these interludes into a story of strength and resilience filtered through the mind of the biographer at work.
Even though there is a dystopian near-future setting for this book, it is not the ruling force, unlike so many of these highly popular stylized novels today. Rather it is the characters who run the show and we see them living their lives as completely normal people, some influenced by the changes in the laws more than others.
What is more interesting is to see them each grow as people, independently choosing their own paths to find out who they are and what they want, despite what society (which could mean their own community, or the world at large, depending) thinks of them. Each one is such a strong example of how you can overcome restrictions to get what you want, or change your path in life to move toward a better life.
No matter what your views may be on abortion—that really isn't the point of this book. Zumas has dug into the lives of normal women and found resiliency, strength, and a desire to change their own lives.
Isn't that what we all want?
My thanks to Little Brown for my finished copy of this book.
Red Clocks presents a world that feels eerily familiar to reality...or a reality that is on the horizon. Abortion is now illegal. Adoption is to be only an option for heterosexual, married couples. And IVF is a thing of the past. And in this society of Zumas' imagining, we have a teenage girl having her first sexual encounter, a medicine woman who offers homeopathic solutions to troubled women, a single science teacher who wants a baby, and a married mother of two who isn't as happy as she should be. Through these seemingly separate stories, we are challenged to ask ourselves what is a woman for when women's rights are restricted.
Zumas is successful in establishing the different voices then gradually and delicately weaving the women's stories together as things come to a head when Mattie (the teenage girl) discovers that she's pregnant. However, the weakest link is that of the polar explorer, whose tale we learn solely through the biography that Ro (the science teacher) is writing. We glean details of Eivor's fragments of text, which prevents us from truly getting to know her on the same level of intimacy as we do with the others. Still, her connection to the other women becomes apparent, but whether she is necessary will be determined by the reader's preference. I myself often felt taken out of the story, largely constructed as having each chapter be a different woman, when the snippets of Eivor's were folded into the events of the overarching story.
Zumas is successful in establishing the different voices then gradually and delicately weaving the women's stories together as things come to a head when Mattie (the teenage girl) discovers that she's pregnant. However, the weakest link is that of the polar explorer, whose tale we learn solely through the biography that Ro (the science teacher) is writing. We glean details of Eivor's fragments of text, which prevents us from truly getting to know her on the same level of intimacy as we do with the others. Still, her connection to the other women becomes apparent, but whether she is necessary will be determined by the reader's preference. I myself often felt taken out of the story, largely constructed as having each chapter be a different woman, when the snippets of Eivor's were folded into the events of the overarching story.
This one was tough to read, primarily because the premise--an America that has entirely outlawed abortion and is actively removing rights from women--seems too close to reality. But the women that weave their stories are raw and real. We first know them only by their roles/places in society and, by default in this universe, in relation to men. As their stories unfold, we learn their identities and follow along with each journey of discovery.
Upon further reflection I am bumping this down a star even more, the language this author used just did not work for me whatsoever, though she certainly did envision a VERY realistic reality if abortions are deemed illegal here again, I could absolutely see this world playing out exactly as written. But I wish I could have connected with the characters.