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A review by blueberry31
Red Clocks by Leni Zumas
2.0
Can we please stop comparing this book to the masterpiece that is The Handmaid's Tale?
Red Clocks fails on many levels for me. The style put me off. I can appreciate writing with a lot of poetry and imagery incorporated into it, in fact I usually really tend to enjoy this... but in this case the author's writing just makes reading extremely strenuous, to the point that the story is hard to follow, the characters difficult to get attached to and getting to the end is a chore. It got to a point where I was systematically skipping extracts of the autobiography one of the characters is writing, I simply failed to get the point.
The story... well is there really much of a story? It feels like a series of events are presented, and they happen to take place in a "dystopian" society (not all that dystopian given the current events in the US if you ask me...). The dystopian USA depicted in Red Clocks was both too close to the USA we know today and not developped enough to be interesting... If you are expecting Gilead-type setting you've come to the wrong place, the author hasn't pushed the concept that far at all. Maybe it would have been impactful to show the disastrous consequences of anti-abortion laws, but in this case it falls short, instead telling quite a boring story in my opinion, that stirs very little emotion. As mentioned previously, the style put a lot of distance between reader and characters, which made it hard to connect with any of them.
So... tedious read for me.
Red Clocks fails on many levels for me. The style put me off. I can appreciate writing with a lot of poetry and imagery incorporated into it, in fact I usually really tend to enjoy this... but in this case the author's writing just makes reading extremely strenuous, to the point that the story is hard to follow, the characters difficult to get attached to and getting to the end is a chore. It got to a point where I was systematically skipping extracts of the autobiography one of the characters is writing, I simply failed to get the point.
The story... well is there really much of a story? It feels like a series of events are presented, and they happen to take place in a "dystopian" society (not all that dystopian given the current events in the US if you ask me...). The dystopian USA depicted in Red Clocks was both too close to the USA we know today and not developped enough to be interesting... If you are expecting Gilead-type setting you've come to the wrong place, the author hasn't pushed the concept that far at all. Maybe it would have been impactful to show the disastrous consequences of anti-abortion laws, but in this case it falls short, instead telling quite a boring story in my opinion, that stirs very little emotion. As mentioned previously, the style put a lot of distance between reader and characters, which made it hard to connect with any of them.
So... tedious read for me.