Red Clocks

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Other than that, it feels like popular fiction, complete with disgruntled housewives, teachers who dream of having children but are denied, little girls who get pregnant and must suffer all kinds of horrors in this realistic world of insanity.

Similar to The Handmaid's Tale, women find themselves in an inequitable society where the Personhood Amendment has granted rights to embryos, IVF is illegal, and of course, abortion is universally banned. As the author has remarked “there’s not much in “Red Clocks” that hasn’t been suggested by an actual lawmaker”. It presents the interlinked stories of five very different woman in a world where reproductive choice is restricted. Yet, Zumas succeeds at writing an original, thought-provoking story that deeply resonates with our current state of affairs. The mender (aka “The Witch”), was another favorite of mine, as she uses her herbal remedies to help women that sought medical help.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. With such a provocative premise, you might expect Red Clocks to be an activist novel, or a polemical one. The rank uselessness of the men who appear in this novel crystallises in their words, in the way they contradict their words with their actions. The changes to United States laws don't happen overnight; there's a slow creep of government restrictions. The chapters rotate between The Biographer (Ro), The Wife (Susan), The Daughter (Mattie), and the Mender; all characters are referred to by their first names in conversation.

In every case I could see, the grammatical subject was also the subject of that particular chapter, which is to say one of the five women. Susan resents Ro's professional aspirations and other mothers who she sees as more perfect than her. Instead of creating a far-off dystopian society, Leni Zumas picks up on trends in our current political climate and thinks them through. This book is so good precisely because it is not dismissible science fiction but rather feels more like a cautionary tale of what could happen tomorrow if we don't keep a close watch on things. If not for her comparing mind and covetous heart, the biographer could feel compassion for her fellow criminals.Ro asks herself over and over again why she wants to be a mother, and can only answer, Because I do. Susan – is a mother of two, once a promising legal student she gave up her career for marriage and children, her under-motivated husband uses his only skills (natural French speaker) to scrape a salary as a French teacher while the two live rent free in Susan’s childhood home. Wry and urgent, defiant and stylish, Zumas's braided tale follows the intertwined fates of four women whose lives this law irrevocably alters. That Red Clocks does all this while portraying the everyday existence of four such different characters in persuasive, gripping language is striking.

Paul was complacent in the beginning as in: “don’t be silly, nothing to be concerned about -this is the Bay Area of Gay Pride”.This question is interesting from many several angles and extends beyond the issue of reproductive rights. A judge later ruled that the Munoz must be removed from life support, but laws overriding a pregnant patient's advanced directives remain. For the most part, this is a thoughtful novel that examines the concept of motherhood and women's identity from several perspectives.