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jessicaesquire 's review for:
Red Clocks
by Leni Zumas
I have seen a significant uptick in the "feminist dystopia" genre in the last year, but RED CLOCKS is the first book to fall into this category that feels fully realized and fully successful to me.
It took me a little while to get going, to understand how the characters fit together, and to see how the structure of the book was going to work. But once I was oriented I found myself getting deeply absorbed. I read this book on the sidelines of t-ball practice, with people and kids running all around me, working as hard as I could to tune it out because I wanted more time in it.
Sometimes in these near-future dystopias I find myself annoyed and rolling my eyes. Most of these books are societies where things suddenly turn on a dime, where the change happens so quickly, and where the real repercussions of that kind of change don't actually seem to penetrate. The new society is the kind of society where the current rules have always been the rules. It's not the most effective worldbuilding. Here, I felt regularly creeped out by Zumas's speculative leaps. They feel like the kind of thing that could happen, that could happen soon, that could happen even with the hurdles it would require. And more than that, the world she lives in is one where people remember the rules before, where not everyone likes them, where people are still figuring out what to do with the new cards they've been dealt. To me, that makes it much more scary and affecting than a book with a horrific patriarchal system that feels farther away from my own reality.
The structure of the novel is basically perfect. The four women in the book all have lives centered around the central system of the female sex: its ability to bear children. It is the thing that has made patriarchal culture what it is, but it is also something that women have reclaimed and found joy and identity in as feminism has evolved. The way these women relate to pregnancy, birth, abortion, and childrearing stands in stark contrast to one another, but they all felt real and personally relevant. That Zumas allows them to be so different, to envy and dislike each other for their differences, and leaves it all without comment, without choosing any one character to be a moral highground or an arbiter of what is good, is another thing I liked about it so much. The book stays zoomed in on these women's lives, letting us see how they intertwine and react. It doesn't try to make a bigger statement, which is why it makes such an effective statement.
Extra bonus points for the fantastic cover, get the actually physical book if you can and take it with you out in public because there is very little in the world that is better than a book with (basically) a vagina on the cover.
It took me a little while to get going, to understand how the characters fit together, and to see how the structure of the book was going to work. But once I was oriented I found myself getting deeply absorbed. I read this book on the sidelines of t-ball practice, with people and kids running all around me, working as hard as I could to tune it out because I wanted more time in it.
Sometimes in these near-future dystopias I find myself annoyed and rolling my eyes. Most of these books are societies where things suddenly turn on a dime, where the change happens so quickly, and where the real repercussions of that kind of change don't actually seem to penetrate. The new society is the kind of society where the current rules have always been the rules. It's not the most effective worldbuilding. Here, I felt regularly creeped out by Zumas's speculative leaps. They feel like the kind of thing that could happen, that could happen soon, that could happen even with the hurdles it would require. And more than that, the world she lives in is one where people remember the rules before, where not everyone likes them, where people are still figuring out what to do with the new cards they've been dealt. To me, that makes it much more scary and affecting than a book with a horrific patriarchal system that feels farther away from my own reality.
The structure of the novel is basically perfect. The four women in the book all have lives centered around the central system of the female sex: its ability to bear children. It is the thing that has made patriarchal culture what it is, but it is also something that women have reclaimed and found joy and identity in as feminism has evolved. The way these women relate to pregnancy, birth, abortion, and childrearing stands in stark contrast to one another, but they all felt real and personally relevant. That Zumas allows them to be so different, to envy and dislike each other for their differences, and leaves it all without comment, without choosing any one character to be a moral highground or an arbiter of what is good, is another thing I liked about it so much. The book stays zoomed in on these women's lives, letting us see how they intertwine and react. It doesn't try to make a bigger statement, which is why it makes such an effective statement.
Extra bonus points for the fantastic cover, get the actually physical book if you can and take it with you out in public because there is very little in the world that is better than a book with (basically) a vagina on the cover.