Take a photo of a barcode or cover
shli 's review for:
Red Clocks
by Leni Zumas
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.