Take a photo of a barcode or cover
mainon 's review for:
Red Clocks
by Leni Zumas
Clocks are vaginas.
I personally thought that was pretty interesting, liguistically, but thought I should give fair warning to anyone who's wondering "what are red clocks?" Answer: they're vaginas. Or maybe "wombs" is more accurate.
In this refreshingly female-focused speculative fiction universe, the Personhood Amendment has been added to the Constitution, outlawing abortion and IVF. A new Every Child Needs Two law is on the horizon, which would prohibit singles from adopting.
The book stays in third person perspective, but rotates its lens among several women, focusing on one at a time. The Biographer is a single high-school teacher who desperately wants to get pregnant, and is also writing a biography of a (fictional, I think) female Icelandic polar explorer. (The snippets of this biography, with its meditations on pack ice and proto-feminism, are probably my favorite parts of the book.) The Mender is a traditional herbalist who lives in the woods. The Wife is exactly that, a bored housewife wondering what else she could be doing with her life. Her daughter is The Daughter, a high-school student whose close friend was one of the first women to violate the Personhood Amendment.
There are men in the narrative: the principal of the school where the biographer teaches and the daughter attends, and where the wife's husband also teaches; the mender has a special friend who comes by regularly; and the daughter has a mad crush on a boy her age. But with the exception of the mender's special friend, these men are all jackasses who barely seem to recognize that the women in their lives have needs, have desires, have agency... that they are persons, fully developed. That (not entirely unexpectedly) throws the backdrop of the Personhood Amendment into sharp and purposeful relief.
This is not a subtle narrative, but it is nonetheless a believable one. The people content to live in a world where individual women's needs and desires are subjugated to political/male commandments are, it turns out, pretty familiar. And that's the most shocking thing about Red Clocks: it shows us a potential future that, when you get right down to it, isn't shocking at all.
Please note: I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publishers, but I also purchased my own hard copies from both Powell's (slipcased) and BOTM because it resonated so strongly.
I personally thought that was pretty interesting, liguistically, but thought I should give fair warning to anyone who's wondering "what are red clocks?" Answer: they're vaginas. Or maybe "wombs" is more accurate.
In this refreshingly female-focused speculative fiction universe, the Personhood Amendment has been added to the Constitution, outlawing abortion and IVF. A new Every Child Needs Two law is on the horizon, which would prohibit singles from adopting.
The book stays in third person perspective, but rotates its lens among several women, focusing on one at a time. The Biographer is a single high-school teacher who desperately wants to get pregnant, and is also writing a biography of a (fictional, I think) female Icelandic polar explorer. (The snippets of this biography, with its meditations on pack ice and proto-feminism, are probably my favorite parts of the book.) The Mender is a traditional herbalist who lives in the woods. The Wife is exactly that, a bored housewife wondering what else she could be doing with her life. Her daughter is The Daughter, a high-school student whose close friend was one of the first women to violate the Personhood Amendment.
There are men in the narrative: the principal of the school where the biographer teaches and the daughter attends, and where the wife's husband also teaches; the mender has a special friend who comes by regularly; and the daughter has a mad crush on a boy her age. But with the exception of the mender's special friend, these men are all jackasses who barely seem to recognize that the women in their lives have needs, have desires, have agency... that they are persons, fully developed. That (not entirely unexpectedly) throws the backdrop of the Personhood Amendment into sharp and purposeful relief.
This is not a subtle narrative, but it is nonetheless a believable one. The people content to live in a world where individual women's needs and desires are subjugated to political/male commandments are, it turns out, pretty familiar. And that's the most shocking thing about Red Clocks: it shows us a potential future that, when you get right down to it, isn't shocking at all.
Please note: I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publishers, but I also purchased my own hard copies from both Powell's (slipcased) and BOTM because it resonated so strongly.