Book Review: “Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas
The clocks are ticking, and the time is running out
Title: Red Clocks. First Published: 2018. Genre: Dystopia, Science Fiction, Contemporary. Publisher: Little, Brown and Company. Pages: 368.
Imagine a distant dystopian future where women’s reproductive rights are under total control. Abortions are illegal, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and soon another law will come into effect allowing adoption only for married couples. Even the neighboring state authorities agreed to stop women in a certain age range at border control and deport them back to their country if they suspected that these women were up to no good.
This is the world that author Leni Zumas described back in 2018, yes, almost six years ago, in her book “Red Clocks.” These are the clocks that are “ticking” for every heroine in her novel.
So, it is four of them, living in a small stereotypical town somewhere in Oregon:
- Ro is a high school teacher by day and a writer by evening. She is working on the biography of a little-known female traveler and explorer. And she is also putting all her money, time, efforts, and hopes into getting pregnant, with no luck so far.
- Mattie goes to this high school and actually likes Ro as a teacher. But as with every teenager, she has other stuff on her plate, the most important being the accidental pregnancy. Being a teenage mother is not in her plans for the future. She is also very afraid to disappoint her parents, so Mattie is on her own in this one.
- Susan is a happy wife and caring mother of two angels. She has it all: husband, family, and house. But why does she feel so awful? The only thing she dreams about is getting one or two days on her own when she can stay alone with her thoughts and feelings.
- And then there is Gin, who lives in the forest and practices healing with the help of her natural gift and the gifts of nature.
It seems that these women don’t have a lot in common, but it is actually Gin who brings them all together. And the topic of motherhood, obviously. The book’s composition resembles “Wayward” by Emilia Hart. Each chapter is dedicated to one of these women and speaks only about her issue. However, it doesn’t mean that they are disconnected. With every new twist, Zumas shows that the problem of one of her heroines is a reflection of their common troubles. And it all comes back to these laws, described above.
The main question regarding these laws is this: if they are meant to do good for people, why are they making the lives of women so miserable? Well, maybe because the first part of the question is an incorrect assumption and the goals for writing these laws are different.
Recently, I came across a decent number of books that raise the topic of womanhood, motherhood, and sisterhood. It doesn’t seem like a coincident or conformational bias. Rather, it looks like a cloud that is hanging in the sky above our heads, and by the gray and thick look of it, it is easy to guess that rain and thunderstorms are coming.
