Publishers Weekly
10/16/2017
Zumas (The Listeners) imagines a palpable, powerful alternate reality in which the United States has passed the Personhood amendment, reversing Roe v. Wade and making abortion a crime. Four women whose futures changed overnight with the passage of the amendment struggle for equality in rural Oregon. Roberta Stephens has chosen to pursue a teaching career and faces an uphill battle to have a child in an oppressively gendered system while writing a biography of an obscure female polar explorer named Eivør Minervudottir. Roberta’s star pupil is high school student Mattie Quarles, who, finding herself pregnant, makes a run for the Canadian border. Susan Korsmo, the wife of one of Roberta’s colleagues, is quietly suffocating as an overburdened mother of two. Finally there is Gin Percival, a forest-dwelling “mender” providing illegal gynecological services until she is arrested for medical malpractice. As Gin’s court proceedings devolve into a modern-day witch trial, the fates of these women converge—with parallels to the life of Eivør—as they are pushed into a series of bold challenges to the masculine power structures that stifle them. Zumas manages a loose yet consistently engaging tone as she illustrates the extent to which the self-image of modern women is shaped by marriage, career, or motherhood. Dark humor further enhances the novel, making this a thoroughly affecting and memorable political parable. (Jan.)
From the Publisher
"This is the dystopia that the right wing wants...the characters in Red Clocks are nuanced and funny, and the novel itself is as in-your-face yet strangely beautiful as the cover art."
—Esquire.com
"Zumas' book stands out from the crowd for its thoroughness in revealing the hypocrisy inherent to valuing the lives a woman brings into this world, but not the life of the woman herself."
—Nylon
"Like Margaret Atwood in The Handmaid's Tale, Portland author Leni Zumas' new book describes a future both frightening and all too possible....[Zumas]has a lovely way with a sentence and a sharp understanding of how women can be jealous and supportive of each other in equal measure. The coastal setting is vividly rendered, as is the everyday reality of doctor appointments, dirty dishes and broken dreams."
—Seattle Times
"A book as lyrical as it is devastatingly honest, Red Clocks fast-forwards to the time after you've marched and called and voted, showing us all the complexities and pains of life in the aftermath."
—Refinery29
"Somewhat in Margaret Atwood territory, but lower-key and closer to present-day reality, this is a vividly imagined work set in a sensual, three-dimensional world."—Sunday Times
"The novel takes place in a United States only slightly extrapolated from our current one-and it's through this familiarity that the book derives its power....Zumas's decision to tell the story from four different perspectives is not just a stylistic flourish. Together, they form a raw portrait of the forces of disenfranchisement that women have faced for millennia. What gives Red Clocks its lingering pungency is how, despite each character's distinct circumstances, the same features-pregnancy, motherhood, and social expectations-trap and menace them all.... Luminous."
—The Nation
"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... 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. 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.... In revealing the true complexity of motherhood and abortion too often obscured by a rabidly misogynistic right wing, Red Clocks does something radical.... 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. It's an amazing thing to be able to do. It's a monstrous thing to force someone to do. And between these two extremes is where most of us live."—Portland Mercury News
Library Journal
★ 10/15/2017
Zumas's second novel (after The Listeners) presents a not-so-distant future where women's reproductive rights have been denied again. In this future, the passage of the Personhood Amendment has overturned Roe v. Wade, establishing every embryo or fetus as a person possessing all the rights (and thus protections) experienced by the rest of the U.S. citizenry. The narrative follows four women residing in a small coastal Oregon town, each struggling to forge an identity while facing pervasive misogyny. The author amplifies the debate about women's rights by referring to each woman by a noun rather than their proper names. The Mender, the Biographer, the Daughter, and the Wife alternately reveal their intertwined stories. Ro, the Biographer, is also writing a book about the exploits of Eivør, a 19th-century female polar explorer who share these struggles for women's rights to be recognized as legitimate. In language both poetic and political, Zumas presents characters who are strong and determined; each is an individual in her own right. VERDICT Inevitably, there will be comparisons to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, but Zumas's work is not nearly as dystopic or futuristic, only serving to make it that much more believable. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 7/31/17.]—Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis
Kirkus Reviews
2017-10-16
The lives of five women in a small Oregon town are affected by the outlawing of abortion and an imminent ban on single parenthood.A billboard on the highway to Canada reads, "WON'T STOP ONE, / WON'T START ONE. / CANADA UPHOLDS U.S. LAW!" After the Personhood Amendment grants rights to embryos, the U.S.-Canadian border becomes a "Pink Wall." Women crossing to seek pregnancy terminations or in vitro fertilizations are returned to the U.S. for prosecution. Following the current fashion for braided narratives, this story is told from five perspectives. Ro, whose chapters are labeled "The Biographer," is a single high school teacher who's trying desperately to get pregnant before single parenthood is outlawed. Mattie, "The Daughter," is an academically gifted teenager whose best friend is already in juvenile jail for attempting a home abortion. Now she too is pregnant, and desperate. Susan, "The Wife," is married to another teacher at the high school, miserable with him and with domestic life in general. She and the Biographer are competitive frenemies who misunderstand and resent each other even as they regularly socialize. Gin, "The Mender," is a natural healer who lives in the woods, an underground provider of herbal abortions, in more danger from the new laws than she realizes. Finally, Eivør Minervudottir is a (fictional) 19th-century explorer of the North Pole, the subject of the Biographer's work. Her sections are brief avant-garde flashes that include recipes for cooking puffin and pilot whale and crossed-out lines revealing the Biographer's process. The other four characters are entangled in complicated, trickily unfolding ways, as is usual in this type of fractured narrative. Zumas (The Listener, 2012, etc.) is a lyrical polymath of a writer: she loves wordplay and foreign terms, she has an ear for dialogue, and she knows an impressive amount about herbal healing, Arctic exploration, and the part of the U.S. her story is set in, its "dark hills dense with hemlock, fir, and spruce," its "fog-smoked evergreen mountains, thousand-foot cliffs plunging straight down to the sea."A good story energized by a timely premise but perhaps a bit heavy on the literary effects.
