Red Clocks
Ratings43
Average rating3.6
It's a not entirely unlikely future scenario - hell we're already well underway with the cagily named “Heartbeat” rulings being pushed in several US states. In this, the darkest of timelines, abortion has become illegal. Those that provide abortion services can be charged with second degree murder and those seeking abortion can face significant jail time. In vitro fertilization is banned and legislation is being put into place demanding every child should have two parents.
In this environment we have the biographer/teacher Ro desperately trying to conceive before the laws are put into place making it impossible. Susan the housewife and mother feeling trapped, tied to a blithely oblivious jerk of a husband. Mattie the high schooler who finds herself pregnant and seeing her future dreams slipping away.
I loved the interactions between the characters. How these characters see each other through their own wants and desires. How the childless Ro quietly seethes at the mother in Susan and yearns at the possibility in Mattie. Wrestling between her own self-interest and what Mattie needs. How Gin, the healer in the woods is understood by the women in the community. Those moments really shine for me.
But as a whole it just didn't work for me. Maybe I'm just Pete, the oblivious dude friend to the equally crass Didier. Typical guy, doesn't get it. It just seems to deal with the aftermath of these ruling and duh, it kinda sucks for women. It puts their lives in danger, wrongfully incarcerates them and subtly pits them against each other. Preaching to the converted here. I wanted a villain and not just ignorant men. I wanted to read about how this affects the Christian right that has been fighting for this, how lawmakers subvert the rules when it's beneficial to them, how you justify denying abortion when it's rape or incest. Maybe it just wan't dystopian enough and instead focused on the hand wringing of suburban white women when the current conversation IRL happening right now feels way more dire.
Oh my, this was just not for me at all!
I heard the premise and thought it sounded so good but the execution was not something I could connect to. The characters are referred to by titles (The Wife, The Daughter, The Biographer, etc.) which is odd enough and creates a distance with the reader, but they are also referred to by name in the same chapters which was just confusing!
I didn't actually mind the short and choppy writing style, I think it lends speed to a narrative as long as the narrative can take it, however I felt like some sections were completely irrelevant and I simply didn't see how they were part of the story.
I'm not going to belittle my own intelligence by saying that maybe I “just didn't get it” (eye roll!), as I understood it fine, I just didn't enjoy the way this was told.
Red Clocks first caught my attention because it's set in a small fishing town in Oregon, my home state. After that, learning that it's a dystopia where abortion and in vitro fertilization have both been banned outright meant I HAD to read it. Of course, I got it from the library some weeks ago and had so many other books to read that I didn't get to it until the day it was due back to the library! Luckily, I read fast!
I think the cover description oversells the book a little. I wouldn't call Gin's trial “frenzied” nor the drama exactly “riveting” but it did keep my attention throughout the book. I really enjoyed the relationships between the characters, and the point that none of them really know what is going on in each other's personal lives. One moment I particularly liked is slightly spoilery, but I loved how Ro was able to put her personal feelings aside to help Mattie, her student. That was really, really hard for her, but she recognized how much damage it would do to Mattie to not help her.
I think I found Gin the most interesting - given all the reading I've been doing lately about autism, her entire personality screams autism to me, but she was never labeled as autistic. So I'm marking her as a possibly autistic character. (I'd love if any of my autistic readers could weigh in on that, if you've read the book!) Between preferring to live in the woods with animals and NOT around people, specifically, and the way she reacts to the textures and smells in the jail when she's arrested (shoving the bleach-scented blankets as far away in the cell as possible, and refusing to eat the food), and how she stumbles over her answers in the courtroom when she's interrogated - it seems likely.
My only actual complaint about this book had nothing to do with the writing or plot! But it refers to the ghost pepper as “the hottest pepper known to man” which the Carolina Reaper growing in my backyard would have an issue with!
Other than that very minor quibble, I thought this dystopia was pretty good. I'm always interested in Reproductive Rights-related dystopias. This isn't as good as The Handmaid's Tale, but it's MILES better than Future Home of the Living God. It's good at showing the lengths women will go to, to ensure their own reproductive freedom. Outlawing abortion doesn't eliminate abortion. It just makes it less safe.
You can find all my reviews at Goddess in the Stacks.
I'll round this up to a 2.5 but I found Red Clocks generally underwhelming. I understood where Leni Zumas was going with the cultural and political commentary but I never felt like I got enough time with the characters to really care deeply about their journeys. And that is saying something since this book comes in at 300+ pages. The most compelling story was about a woman who died 150 years before this book starts - and we get the fewest details about her. I really, really wanted to like this book more but it just didn't do it for me.
If you're looking for something in this vein but much better, check out The Power by Naomi Alderman.
I read this really quickly (once I actually started it), but somehow I didn't feel like I ever really got into it. It's not bad at all, but I felt at a remove from all the characters - I'm guessing at least part of this was intentional, considering how the chapters are titled “The Daughter,” “The Mender” and so on. The most interesting parts of the novel to me were Ro and Mattie's stories. I thought I knew where they were going, but I was wrong and I really like how everything turned out there. Susan and Gin's stories didn't feel like they connected with the others in the same way, and Susan's in particular feels like it could be in any work of fiction written in the past sixty or so years. That's not necessarily bad, and it was definitely well-written, but it didn't seem to take advantage of the setting in the same way as the others. As far as the setting, I wish the author had taken it further - I know all these restrictions are based in reality, but the world didn't seem as fully realized as something like The Handmaid's Tale, even. (Like, did they get rid of the Supreme Court? Most of the new laws would be blatantly unconstitutional.) Overall, this was interesting and definitely a change of pace from my usual fiction reading, but I don't think it's something I'll be compelled to return to.
I really enjoyed this story, but some of the writing was awkward (honestly, I had to check if the author was a man or woman because some of it sounded the way a man would write about women). The story was really well done though. I liked the interconnected stories and seeing them all come together. Really good if you can get past some of the writing.
Meh.
This is not a bad read, it just doesn't add anything to the fight. I liked some characters more than others, and felt that the story really belonged to Ro. The Explorer's story, imho, added nothing and just distracted. I could not stand Susan or understand where she was coming from (I mean, I get that some people marry and have kids and then find it's not what they wanted after all-but I never understood what SUSAN's problem was. She's tired of cleaning?)
And I wanted more Gin. She, to me, was the most interesting, most pivotal character and we just don't get enough.
Once I picked this up and started reading, I read it straight through in a single day. The story is told through the lives of five women who have different connections to motherhood in a small Oregon town. In the recent past of this book, laws have changed to make abortion and in vitro fertilization illegal. Life is legally defined as beginning at conception, and embryos are endowed with rights to life, liberty, and property. Also, looming in the novel is a new law about to take effect in the new year that restricts the right to adopt a child to married couples only.
In this situation, we meet “the biographer,” a history teacher at the local high school, a single woman who is trying to become pregnant via sperm donor. She is also writing a biography of a female Arctic explorer of the 19th century who was forced to have her work published under a male colleague's name, because no one believed it was her own work.
There is also “the wife,” a married woman with two small children who is dealing with despair about her marriage. “The daughter” is a 14 year old girl who was adopted into a happy home and feels she can't tell her parents about her accidental pregnancy. “The mender” is a woman who grew up in the town and has been dismissed as “stupid” (she didn't finish high school),”crazy” (she prefers to live on her own in the forest with only the trees and animals for company), or a “witch” (people come to her for herbal remedies).
I liked the way this book showed this group of women dealing with the problems of their lives against a background of a repressive political reality in a non-preachy way. I didn't want to read a novel about how bad a repressive society is. Instead, this is a novel that shows women grappling with the question, “What is my life for?”–much more interesting!
I did wonder whether, in the universe of the novel, same sex marriages would be recognized as legitimate, and whether same sex couples would be able to adopt. I also wondered whether a teen mother would be able to keep her baby after the “Every Child Needs 2 (parents)” law took effect. I felt like these were obvious questions that should have been addressed (especially since there was a pregnant teen who would be giving birth after the law took effect), so it made the book feel less finished to me.
Still, I really enjoyed it.