Red Clocks (Zumas)

Red Clocks
Leni Zumas, 2018
Little, Brown and Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316434812


Summary
Five women. One question. What is a woman for?

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.

In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom.

• Ro is a single high-school teacher, trying to have a baby on her own while also writing a biography of Eivor, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer.
• Susan is a frustrated mother of two trapped in a crumbling marriage.
• Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro's best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn.
• 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.

Red Clocks is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. 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.

This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous-even frightening-times. (From the publisher.)