Whilst I appreciated the politically dense subject matter discoursed on and the stark beauty that the writing style exhibited, I could not continue reading this due to the multitude of animal deaths featured within. This is something I am particularly sensitive on reading and try to avoid at all times, due to how deeply it effects me. For that reason I had to end my reading of this 33% of the way through. I still maintain that this a profound novel and am interested in reading more from this author, but this particular book was just not for me.

I think this is one of those books that we will be talking about for a very long time. The dystopian view presented to us is far too close to the bone. In a world where women's rights are being both overtly and covertly eroded. This book exploring the lives and dilemmas of 5 women living in a society that may greet us in the not too distant future. The women's characters are well developed and relatable. It is very well written with a wonderful flow and is a compelling read.

THERE ARE MILD SPOILERS IN THIS REVIEW.

I absolutely loved this book and will be recommending it to all my female friends ... and my male ones too. I believe it has some important things to say. As a woman I could relate to so much in this book that I feel unable to review it in a coherent and detached manner. The emotions it raised were raw and unregulated and yet commonplace and routinely repressed. For example, the witch hunt that was both figurative and literal. For example, the adoring mother who longed to escape her children. For example, the would-be single mother, infertile and wondering if her desire for a child was biological or cultural. For example, the woman forced to publish her life's work under a man's name. And so much more. So much to unpack here. So many emotions. Beautifully written, devastating, heart breaking, uplifting and utterly wonderful.

I had seen this book everywhere on Instagram and Twitter and really liked the premise. Despite them scaring the bejesus out of me, I really like dystopian novels and this one sounded excellent.

In this world abortion is illegal and women are sent to prison for murder even for just asking for an abortion. Women try to cross the border to Canada for terminations, only to find they’re arrested and tried in their home state for murder.

Red Clocks is about five women and how their lives are affected by this change. As the novels go on, their lives become connected. But this is five out of over 100 million women in America. You could probably write hundreds of books set in this world. The life of every single woman is affected. Even to the point that single women wouldn’t be able to go adopt or go through IVF. Is it any better for children to have two parents?

It’s different to other dystopian novels in that it’s not too far from where we are now. It’s not like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Power where everything is completely different, where some supernatural phenomenon or war has changed society. In making abortion illegal it affects everyones lives in a new way. Their choice, their rights to their bodies was taken away from them. It’s a scary world, a slippery slope that would lead to a world like The Handmaid’s Tale.

An excellent story, a truly chilling warning and one world I hope to never be a part of.

I had heard a lot about this book so was intrigued to read it. I can understand the mixed opinions on it, as while I think it is an interesting concept, I think it could have been done better.

The writing makes this book quite a difficult read. It’s such an emotive subject so I don’t think distancing the readers from the characters works here. The chapters jump between the different women, and I could it hard to keep track of who each was about.

Personally, I think the wrong style was chosen for the book, and a more in-depth look at the women’s lives and feelings would engage the reader more.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel.
The women are simultaneously Everywoman, all of whom have rights worthy of protecting/demanding, or at least representative of a group or 'type' - and also completely individual and different, not representative but entirely their own self.. Women are all different after all, each having our own personality, our own disparate set of wants, needs and motivations - which often bring us into criticism/resentment of and conflict with each other as is seen here between the main female characters.
'The Red Clocks' is simple but effectively written and structured, incredibly believable and realistically written. This is sadly something we could easily imagine becoming reality within the next year or two - and the setting and characters are everyday people whom we could potentially encounter anywhere at any time. We are also given in this story, a sweeping look at patriarchal society (the biographer adding wider scope with her work), female individuality among
the general biological realities of the gender/species, juxtaposed with male privilege.
Nature as a whole is both showcased and set against human society - alongside the reproductive gynaecology of human females, we also see the simpler woodland life with near self-sufficiency of a herbalist, differing views on life/death, the power of the elements, the unpredictability of certain landscapes, and whales......for whom differences between human cultural groupings/societal norms can mean a world of difference, life or violent death.....just as societal differences in attitude or law surrounding reproduction, abortion and personhood and rights vary and are dictated from one human or cultural group to another, nothing to do with what is natural at all.
There is so much which could be said about the issues covered here by the author, Leni Zumas, but one thing I think is certain looking at various reviews I've seen as well as the book itself is that women need to become more comfortable with their own biological reality and the use of 'gynaecological terminology' in writing and conversation. Women are complaining about 'unnecessary detail' and 'swearing' from the outsider character who provides herbal remedies - she's not swearing, she uses a word which has more recently come to be used as an insult and considered 'nasty' but is in fact, in the way she uses it, merely an alternative, older, less clinical name for a body part. Perhaps we can infer that part of the author's message is that we need to free ourselves of shame and embarrassment about our bodies, get free of that subjugation which sees our bodies as unpleasant and inappropriate, begin by knowing ourselves and being able to confidently name our parts. Ironically, I feel that if I specify the words I mean here my review could well be withdrawn.
This book is highly recommended though as an effective, engaging and thought provoking piece of work - and I'm not going to compare it to any other, as many others are, because I feel that's also unnecessary, the concept and finished tale works well enough in it's own right.

I chose to read Red Clocks by Leni Zumas because the premise reminded me of my favourite book The Handmaid’s Tale. In some ways this comparison was accurate but in others it didn’t quite match up.

In Red Clocks a law has been passed making abortions illegal in America. Not only that but IVF has also been outlawed and in a few months, adoption will only be made available to two parents families.

The new laws effect each of the four main characters in the book in a different way. ‘The Biographer’, Ro, is a single woman desperately using sperm donors in an attempt to gain a child of her own. ‘The Daughter’, Matilda, is pregnant with an unwanted child and nowhere to turn. ‘The Wife’, Susan, is desperate for a way out of her failing marriage. ‘The Mender’, Gin, the victim of a modern-day witch hunt and a herbalist who helps women with problems they can’t solve with traditional means.

Red Clocks is told in split narrative form and includes a fifth character – the subject of the biographer’s book. The excerpts from the life of this fifth character served as an interruption in the plot for me and I frequently found myself skipping the chapters in the book relevant to her.

After reading a lot of run of the mill books in the past few weeks I was expecting to find a five-star book with Red Clocks but although elements of it were definitely brilliant there were also things that let it down.

One of my favourite things about the Red Clocks was the idea of The Personhood Amendment and how plausible it seems in the current US political climate. This is what makes the idea so brilliant and scary, but it feels like it could happen and in a gradual way that many people wouldn’t initially notice just as it did in the book.

“Two years ago the United States Congress ratified the Personhood Amendment, which gives the constitutional right to life, liberty and property to a fertilized egg at the moment of conception. Abortion is now illegal in all fifty states. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder.

In vitro fertilization , too, is federally banned because the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)

She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she hadn’t voted for. This man thought women who miscarried should pay for funerals for the foetal tissue and thought a lab technician who accidentally dropped an embryo during in vitro transfer was guilty of manslaughter.”

The whole passage quoted above was horrifying to read not least the section on women who miscarry.

I felt like four main characters in Red Clocks were essentially stereotypes. I loved the chapters told from the point of view of Matilda and Ro and found that I wanted to know what happened to them. Gin I was expecting to be interested in as I loved the idea of an outsider and ‘witch’ being put on trial. In reality, it wasn’t long before I lost interest in her story, or rather it became a distraction from the stories of Matilda and Ro. Susan’s story on the other hand never really intrigued me that much. She began as a stereotypical mother struggling with her perception of her life as dull and that is how she remained.

I found the prologue highly uninteresting, but the first chapter was more what I was expecting to read. It begins with Ro waiting to undergo some tests related to her fertility and although it was unnecessarily graphic in some areas it was also interesting.

Ro carries a notebook around with her and likes to compile lists. I felt that these lists help the reader to get to know her better and to learn her fears.

“She starts a new one. Accusations from the world.

You’re too old.
If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.
Every child needs two parents.
Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardised tests
You’re too old
You should’ve thought of this earlier.
You’re selfish.
You’re doing something unnatural.
How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?
Your body is a grizzled husk.
You’re too old, sad spinster!
Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?
Gin is a bit of an outsider. She prefers the company of her goats and her cats to most people. Gin’s ideal is to live off the land and be self-sufficient, but she hasn’t quite made it yet. She knows what people think of her that she is a witch and she embraces that image up to a point as she doesn’t like most people.

Matilda has sex in the back of a car with someone she hopes will one day become her boyfriend. Shortly afterwards she finds out she is pregnant, and she is at a lost as to what to do. She knows she doesn’t want to keep it and she doesn’t want the baby to grow up to find they were adopted and to wonder why like she did. She only has one choice, but that choice is illegal.

My favourite character in the book was Ro, mostly because in terms of the new amendment Ro was the character that quite often reflected my own views.

“Last year one of the seniors threw herself down the gym stairs, but even after she broke a rib she was still pregnant, and Ro/Miss said in class she hoped they understood who was to blame for this rib: the monsters in Congress who passed the Personhood Amendment and the walking lobotomists on the Supreme Court who reversed Roe V Wade.”

To start off with some people would travel to Canada to have terminations or IVF but now the ‘Pink Wall’ exists.

“American intelligences must have some nice dirt on the Canadian Prime Minister. Otherwise, why agree to the Pink Wall? The Border Control can detain any woman or girl they ‘reasonably’ suspect of crossing into Canada for the purpose of ending a pregnancy. Seekers are returned (by police escort) to their state of resistance, where the district attorney can prosecute them for attempting a termination. Healthcare providers in Canada are also barred from offering in Vitro Fertilization to US citizens.”

In the new system the only options available for young girls are the illegal ‘term houses’. They have awful reputations and are dangerous to the girls who are desperate enough to chose to go to them.

The premise of Red Clocks was very good, but I feel some of the characters ultimately let it down.

Red Clocks
BOOK
RATING
Red Clocks
Leni Zumas / 2018 / Gender Studies, Science Fiction/Fantasy
6.0 - 2 Ratings

10
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A marmite book!
This follows the lives of five women, in a world where abortion is illegal and seen as murder, IVF is also illegal as the embryo cannot give its opinion, and only married couples can foster and adopt. Back street abortions are back, and the people in a seaside town believe that a woman who lives on her own in the woods and sells cures, is a witch. Each chapter is for a separate female character: the Wife, the Biographer, the Mender, and the Daughter, and between those chapters are snippets from a book that the Biographer is trying to write about a female Arctic explorer. Each woman shows how a patriarchal society inhibits their life choices - they have no choice of their own.
I loved the flow of the language in this novel, I loved the realises of the characters who were shown to be both loving and spiteful, selfish and generous ans strong and weak. Finally, I loved how Zumas has chosen a topic that is all too current in her own country and many others around the world. This is a great book, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it won awards. It has been criticised for riding on the coat tails of The Handmaids Tale, but I really don't think that this is the case. It is a great piece of work in its own right. This is a topic, though, that is very much on people's minds. And rightly so.
I've seen some very mixed reviews about this novel: it seems to attract extremes of hatred/ love, and I'm not overly surprised. I think the best thing to do, is to probably go and read it!
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publisher, Little, Brown and Company for the opportunity to read this!

This is dystopian fiction, with a side of fairy tale. The narrative follows five women who navigate and push up against, the barriers before them. So in a world where abortion is illegal, teenager Mattie is in dire straights. Single Ro is desperate for a baby but is running out of time. Susan is the mother of two but feels trapped in her own family, whilst Gin connects them all and is caught up in a modern day witch hunt.
The book is beautifully written, and it's easy to navigate the multiple narratives. I was reminded a lot of The Handmaid's Tale but Red Clocks has a more poetic feel to it. The story reflects some timely issues that left me thinking 'what if' - what if women were forced into the lives led by the characters; it's a scary thought. There were also some genuinely funny moments that left me smiling. A thought provoking read.

I received a free ebook of Red Clocks from Netgalley. Thankyou to the publisher and Netgalley for giving me the chance to read this! My review is still entirely honest.

Wow. This was not at all what I expected! I expected something thought provoking and insightful, which it 100% was, but from some reviews I've seen, I anticipated a slow, difficult read. I have to disagree with those reviews-I found this book engrossing, very readable and I had real difficulty putting this one down!
Red Clocks follows 5 characters in a near future America where abortion is illegal. Seeking an abortion is considered conspiracy to commit murder, fetuses have all the rights of a regular person from conception, IVF is considered unnatural and is also illegal, and adoption is set to be limited to married couples only. I do have to mention from the off that I am pro choice and live in England, where abortion is quite normalised, and so I was reading this book from that perspective. I do think that the book itself is quite neutral in how it presents issues surrounding reproductive rights, and that it presents both sides of the debate quite convincingly. This world is a scary one for someone with similar views to mine, because it seems so real. Most aspects of life are the same except for this-this isn't a dystopian world that is futuristic and entirely different from our own, this is our world if abortion were once again criminalised.
Each character is used to explore different women's issues and I grew to care for each and every one of them. The Biographer, Ro, is a woman desperate to have a child but who cannot conceive or adopt as a single woman. Infertility issues are portrayed very sensitively in this book and provide a contrast to the Daughter, Mattie, a teenage girl seeking an illegal abortion. Her own fears are presented equally well and given just as much validation as Ro's. I really enjoyed how Ro came to Mattie's aid despite her own personal feelings. The Mother, Susan, is a woman dissatisfied with married life. Her husband, Didier, is a horrible, misogynistic and lazy husband. Her story did not resonate with me as much as the others did, but she also provided another female experience in this story that others may be able to relate to. The Mender, Gin, is different to the others, a naturalist healer (or witch to the public) who provides cures to all ailments, as well as illegal abortions. Her story was almost it's own, and I enjoyed reading about her life. This book really shines in how it connects these characters. They are all connected in so many ways and every chapter brings a new surprise in how we are all associated with one another. I think it was done very skillfully. Some of the less spoilery examples I can mention are that Mattie happens to be Susan's babysitter, and that Ro works with Susan's husband.
My only issues with this book were with some brief confusion surrounding who was who for the first part of the book, since the chapters are prefaced only with 'The Biographer' or the respective term. I also want to briefly mention that the 5th perspective, that of a historical female figure involved in ice exploration, seemed unnecessary and the implications of it went straight over my head. It wasn't uninteresting, but I failed to see the significance of her in this story, or that of the other references, such as the whales or the sea.
Overall, however, one I would highly recommend to anyone interested in exploring women's rights, or to anyone who wants a read that makes you think.

Red Clocks is a dystopian novel set in a near future US where the Personhood Amendment made abortion and IVF are illegal, people who miscarry have to pay for funerals for the foetuses and trying to cross the Canadian border to get an abortion results on being arrested and returned to the US. In addition to these changes, the Every Child Needs Two Act is about to ban adoptions from single parents. The book follows 4 main characters and looks at the effects these laws have for a woman in an unhappy marriage, a woman trying to conceive or adopt a child while being single and struggling with fertility issues, an adopted girl who is seeking an abortion and a “witch” that offers women herbal remedies for infertility and to induce abortions, among other things. While I found the premise very interesting, there were a couple of elements of the book that I didn’t enjoy. Firstly, the main characters are referred to as “the wife”, “the biographer”, “the daughter” and “the mender” which created a distance between the characters and the reader whose purpose is still unknown to me and made it really hard to figure out what was going on and how it was all connected at the start. Secondly, while I got the purpose of the first 3 story lines and the way the reforms were directly affecting their lives and choices I never quite saw the purpose of the mender’s story line, the few things that were directly related were touched upon more effectively on other character’s story lines. Lastly, in between chapters there were snippets of the biography of a 19th century polar explorer (written by the biographer) which reminded me of the Tidal Zone’s Coventry cathedral chapters – something a lot of people liked and thought complemented the story quite well but I thought the book would have been much better without. Overall I’m glad the Women’s Prize Long-list brought my attention to it and the plot covered the repercussions of the laws quite nicely but due to the way it was presented I don’t expect it to be a favourite any time soon.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me access to this prior to publication.
Given the changes taking place in the world around us, the media furore over the perception of women and the renewed interest in feminist dystopian fiction it is, perhaps, inevitable that we end up with a book like ‘Red Clocks’.
In this book we have the stories of five very different women - a schoolteacher, Explorer, medicine woman, stay-at-home mum and a student - and how they cope with the changes to their world.
In this horribly imagined world, we have an amendment to the American Constitution. Now, foetuses have rights and anyone harming one is likely to go on trial for murder. You’d hope things will never go this far, but you can see the potential for it to go this way.
Initially I found this VERY hard to read. The female characters are defined by their roles, and it is quite difficult to work out who is who. However, as the novel progressed I found it easier to link with the characters.
This was a book I felt I needed to persevere with. I appreciate the exploration of motherhood and identity, but I fear there’ll be many readers who give up before they get to the heart of the book.

Set in a not-too-distant future where abortion has been made illegal in the US, Red Clocks follows four women in small town Oregon as they struggle to live their lives in an America where their right to choose has been taken from them. I was expecting something similar to The Power by Naomi Alderman, but the prose in this book sets it apart - the language used is much more reminiscent of magical realism, so it didn’t have the same impact as The Power, as I found it more difficult to connect with the characters. 3.5 bumped up to 4 for the brilliant front cover!

(Thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review)

In this book, we're in a world where United States issues a new law: Personhood Amendment, that gives rights to unborn embryos, making abortion and IVF (because said embryos cannot give consent) illegal. And we're going through the lives of 5 women to see different perspectives and cuts from their lives examining the impact of this law on their lives. Zumas refers to the four main characters as "The Biographer" (Ro), "The Mender" (Gin), a fictional explorer, Eivør Minervudottir, who Ro is writing a book about."The Wife" (Susan), "The Daughter" (Mattie).
It sounded really interesting. I was very curious when I started, but I think the plot didn't follow the premise. I think the writer tried a different style, which felt a bit choppy. We went in and out of the lives of these women without getting to know them, not going deeper to understand their feelings, what they were going through properly. It would be much more impactful, if it was character driven, deep and emotional. I couldn't even feel for these women.
I think the structure was just not for me, as it didn't feel like a plot flowing smoothly over these characters. Maybe it was more experiential style. So, I'm sure there will be people who would enjoy it more.

I have a bit of a love and 'meh' feeling about this book. I loved the setting, as the days go by and Trump's presidency continues, it seems believable that abortion could be banned and fetuses given rights that prevent IVF.

The characters , on the whole, were sympathetic. The teacher who is single and childless, is desperate for a child. The new laws already prevent her from having an IVF child, and up coming laws will ban her from adopting a child. In contrast, her pupil, is pregnant, and is banned from having an abortion.

The witch-like lady who lives in the woods and knows everyone's secrets was a watching presence throughout the tale. I did not have much time for the mother, she is unhappy with her life but her answer of having an affair seemed to be an odd decision. Surely there were other options available?

I was not quite sure what the explorer character added to the party. Granted she had had to struggle against society because she was female, but whereas the other four characters were linked and interacted, the explorer was off on her ice cap in a separate time frame. In my humble opinion I think the story would flow a lot better without her.

Leni Zumas' Red Clocks has been of much interest to the book world - on the back of 2017 being both a year of disastrous politics for women's rights in the US but also a year of empowerment with Women's marches and movements taking off around the world and women speaking out against assault and harassment. Similar to last year's The Power, this dystopian novel promised to take contemporary politics head on.

Zumas' novel follows four females, the Biographer - Ro, the Daughter - Mattie, the Mender - Gin, and the wife, Susan, all living in the same town. The 'Personhood Amendment' has recently been passed, criminalising abortion and IVF for both practitioners and patients alike. On top of this the 'Every Child Needs Two' Law is impending, prioritising couples and blanketly outlawing single women from adopting. These laws affect the women of the story in differing ways - some very directly, and others seemingly not at all (although we do wonder how these laws might impact the characters further down the line - in cases of divorce and custody for example). The incredible thing about this story is the plurality of female experience it represents - it is not one story, but multiple and they are all interconnected. However, this interconnectivity is not to provide neat or happy endings but to illustrate the complexity of the issue - as the reader, we want to tie things up in a simple solution - but realise this compromising logic is part of the problem.

It is hard to discuss this book without giving away spoilers, and in fact a huge part of the pleasure was working out who the characters were and how they were connected. The story is cleverly constructed and the style feeds experimental. It is reminiscent of Ali Smith in the way it taps into the character's lives and interactions. It is at once highly literary and also highly readable - the ongoing biography of a female polar explorer, and themes of whales and the sea complement the narrative and make the already complicated morality of the tale multi-layered.

The story is not without faults - lack of minority representation for example or cardboard male characters, however expecting a novel to accomplish everything in 350 pages is a high bar to set. Zumas does give us pointed reminders of privilege through Mattie's friend Yasmin and the attitudes of the male characters could illustrate a cultural regression in gender roles. Nothing is simple in this novel and with Zumas' clever plotting it would be naive to assume that something is done without reason.

The book makes for uncomfortable but highly compelling and emotive reading - it is not only an intelligent satire and commentary of contemporary politics but an impassioned treatise on the effects that this legislation has on women's lives. This book will certainly make waves this year.

I can see why people are hailing this novel as the next 'The Handmaids Tale', because the similarities between the two books ring surprisingly clear. However, this dystopia presents us with a future that, in the current political climate, doesn't seem too distant. In this future, the Personhood Amendment reverses Roe vs Wade and now, abortion is illegal and those who attempt to provide it can be sentenced to life in prison. This is a really interesting novel that just didn't really pick up until about halfway through, when you start to be able to differentiate between the four women that this book revolves around. A lot of it kind of feels like filler, building up for something that isn't hugely well paid off by the end of the novel. However, I did enjoy it, and I definitely devoured the last half of this book. It felt much more relevant than the first half.

'Red Clocks' follows 4 different characters and raises issues through each of them - a woman's control (or lack of) over her own fertility, pregnancy, abortion, adoption and motherhood. It reads like a dystopia, with the reality being that the scenarios the characters find themselves in are far too close for comfort. Their narratives could be any of ours, and there are politicians in the spotlight right now that would wish for some of the regulations Zumas writes about to be passed. It's a frightening and bleak novel.

I gave this book four stars because it contains so many important and timely questions about women's reproductive rights and raises them in a really interesting way - but it does take a lot of effort to read and I found it a struggle at times.

What I loved most about this dystopian novel is that it doesn’t read like a dystopia. This is very close to our reality. This is the desired reality of some conservative politicians. That is what makes it scary.

She has perfectly honed the ways in which the government can control – and in some cases, are actively trying to control – women’s lives. For me, it acted as a reminder of how privileged some of our “freedoms” are. Not that we shouldn’t fight for more freedoms, but that the freedoms we currently enjoy need constant defending.

Ro was the most interesting character for me. The dilemma she faced was heart breaking and I was willing her to make the other decision. She also brings the additional layer of Eivor Minervudottir. What is a lone woman? Is she the pinnacle of a lone woman? Her story doesn’t interact with the story in any way, other than being the subject of Ro’s intellectual pursuits, but she is a symbol for what is feared in a woman.

Zumas could have pushed the boundaries of the dystopian world further, comparable to When She Woke (my favourite feminist dystopia) but I love that she didn’t. She made a dystopia that could fully feasibly be set in 2019. Some critics have said that it feels too contemporary, but I think that is the genius behind its terror.

Also, I adore how bold the cover design is. Full props to that.