
Zumas is a skillful writer, expertly keeping each of her characters in balanced motion, never allowing one to dominate the rest.

" lyrical and beautifully observed reflection on women's lives. Red Clocks is unabashedly political and fiercely humane."- Emily Fridlund, author of History of Wolves "In bristling sentences, Zumas shows girls and women defying the excruciating restrictions imposed by both law and culture. And between these two extremes is where most of us live."- Portland Mercury News

It's a monstrous thing to force someone to do.

Red Clocks delivers a stark, clear truth about the existential quandary of being a person capable of ceding your body to the gestation of another body. In revealing the true complexity of motherhood and abortion too often obscured by a rabidly misogynistic right wing, Red Clocks does something radical. That book, like this one, is concerned with the existential pain of a life's divergent branching, the numerous "other lighthouses" that exist in the shadow of the real one. Red Clocks has drawn understandable comparisons to the work of Margaret Atwood, but I find the source of Zumas' epigraph, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, a more convincing parallel. "Like the best dystopian fiction, Red Clocks is so close to reality that it feels almost prophetic like the best fiction, it's highly inventive with sharp, stark prose strong characterizations and an undercurrent of humor and hope. This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous - even frightening - times. In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, Leni Zumas fearlessly explores the contours of female experience, evoking The Handmaid's Tale for a new millennium. Red Clocks is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or "mender," who brings all their fates together when she's arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage. Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivv?r, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. Description In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo.įive women.
