Red Clocks follows the lives of four women: the biographer, the wife, the mender, and the daughter shortly after a constitutional amendment has passed that has made abortion and IVF illegal and is about to make adoption by a single parent illegal as well.

While Red Clocks presumably focuses on the current "hot button" issue of abortion, for me this book provides more of a retrospective on the many ways in which women have been relegated, in times past, to a role of "less than" in society. The characterization of one woman (the mender) as a "witch" and another (the wife) as an unhappy housewife I believe to be examples of how women have been trapped and persecuted in the past. The biographer struggles with an all consuming desire to have a child while writing a book about a female polar explorer who is again, limited by pre-defined gender roles. There's an irony to the biographer's desire to be a mother as she writes a book about a woman trying to shake off the traditional female role in favor of exploration and adventure.

It's also interesting to look at the tension between the women themselves. The women intersect in interesting ways, torn between their own desires, judgements, and experiences and empathy for their fellow women. The biographer wants a child and the daughter is going to bear one, but the biographer can't decide whether to support the daughter's desire to end her pregnancy (illegally) or beg her to permit the biographer to adopt the baby. The wife, saddled with two fairly typical children and a stifling marriage of her own, judges the biographer for taking every available avenue to become pregnant. The mender is falsely accused by her lover; herself an abused wife. .

For me, all of this interplay was very interesting and the dystopian premise was probably the weakest part. The subtleties of the story where the true nature of feminism is revealed made the book more meaningful. I loved the structure and the writing itself. I think there is an underlying message here that we women are oftentimes our own worst enemies and not as united in our collective feminist drives as we might think we are.

The ending of the book is beautifully done - - a capstone on writing that felt fresh to me:

"She wants more than one thing."

Does that not summarize the entire truth of the female human experience in the most simple possible way? ( )

The hype on this book was pretty exciting. People were calling it the spiritual successor to The Handmaid’s Tale, so I was naturally excited. It was one of the Book of the Month selections the month after I had stopped subscribing to the service, so I knew it should be on my radar. After reading it, while I would not compare it to Handmaid’s, it is an incredible work of women’s lit on motherhood and loss.

The chapters are told from different perspectives and are named by what the woman represents- Daughter, Mother, Biographer, and Mender. What we know is abortion is illegal in the US and a new law is about to take effect requiring two (a man and a woman) to raise one child. It is sometime in the near future.

The Daughter has been having sex with a boy in her class who quickly moves on from her when he gets bored with her. He leaves her not knowing she is pregnant. The daughter does not want to keep the child and now must figure out what to do.

The Mother is the mother of two in a marriage which is failing. Her children continue to get on her nerves and are growing into this world where clearly males are in charge. She longs to get out of her family, but is completely stuck.

The Biographer is a teacher and a writer. She has been trying to become pregnant by in vitro fertilization and other methods, but is beginning to run out of time and money. The law is changing and if she does not get pregnant, she will be out of time to be a single mother. She longs to be a mom.

The Mender has been labeled the town witch. She performs natural abortions for those seeking her help. Recently, she has given a drink to induce labor to the local principal’s wife, who died shortly after she drank the tea. The Mender will have to fight for her life in a court which has banned any type of abortion.

As the story goes on, the 4 women’s lives will become intertwined with one another as they live their lives within this town.

There are parts of this book which are slow moving, but at the conclusion of the book, I found those parts to be more deliberately slow to draw out relationships or struggles within the women. Their characters become more and more alive as the story progresses and as the world becomes fuller. We see there are no easy answers or black and white answers within this world, even though the country has decided to make the abortion issue black or white.

As much as this is about motherhood and children, it is also very much about the loss of children/family. I will not give too much away as some of it lies in spoiler territory, but I can safely talk about the Biographer. She longs for motherhood and we see her heartbreak as her chances for such become slimmer and slimmer. She begins to get desperate and makes some questionable decisions. She is recognizing though that the family she longs for will not be, so she must wrestle with that loss of the child that never was.

This is overall an incredible book. I can see some being turned off by it because it approaches abortion directly and does not give a quick or easy answer. These women struggle and their world is very much against them, with the Mender, quite literally. There cannot be a happy ending for these women in this world and we recognize that from the very beginning of the book.

I gave this one 4 stars. ( )

I'm late to reading this novel, so late that I'm not certain it should be classified as dystopian, since the world described could become real any day now. Using multiple perspectives, the author presents very different women, different choices, and different desires, but shows how each is constrained by law and expectations. Often I felt like the author was seeking to describe what it's like to live in a woman's body at different stages of life. I identified with several of the women and especially with their experiences. This book was hard to read, but in the best way possible. ( )

In the US, a constitutional amendment has recently passed declaring any fertilized cell to have the full rights of a human being, meaning that anyone who gets or provides an abortion can and will be charged with murder. Another law is about to go into effect, too, preventing single parents from adopting, because "Every Child Needs Two." In this world, we meet four women: One who is desperate to have a child of her own. One who is being driven crazy by her life with her children and her might-as-well-be-a-child husband. One who gave her own baby up for adoption, and who now lives in the woods treating other women with herbs. And a teenage girl who finds herself accidentally pregnant.

I'll be honest, I was a bit leery of this book going in, thinking the odds were higher than I'd like that it'd either be a heavy-handed political screed (which aren't super enjoyable even when I very much agree with them) or an incredibly depressing dystopia (which I might find a little hard to handle these days). But I think it does avoid being either of those. The situation faced by women in this all-too-plausible world is infuriating -- at least, it is if you value reproductive rights, although I imagine the novel would be infuriating in entirely different ways if you think those laws sound like fantastic ideas -- but the novel itself isn't as bleak as I'd feared. And giving us the stories of four different women (or five, if you count the snippets from the biography one of the women is writing), all with very different experiences and desires and perspectives when it comes to their own reproduction, is a great way to explore things.

All that having been said, I still didn't love it, although I keep second-guessing the reasons why. One of them is that I had trouble getting along with the writing style. Zumas hit a major misstep for me almost immediately with the way that she refuses to use her character's names when writing in their POV. That, in itself, is a literary device that can be interesting, but in this case, it turned out that all the characters know each other and readily use each other's names, so it seemed to accomplish absolutely nothing other than keeping me confused, early on, about which names went with which POV characters and who was being talked about at any given moment. I may have started muttering to myself about stupid literary gimmicks and "yet another MFA type whose writing is so 'clever' it can't get out of its own way" or words to that effect. Which is maybe unfair, and I did more or less warm up to the writing eventually, but I think that initial reaction colored a lot of my response to the whole thing.

Also not helping was the fact that I found almost all of the characters annoying. Which is probably also unfair, Hell, the carefully calibrated surgical-strike awfulness of the most irritating character in the book -- the husband of the married POV character -- is actually a fairly impressive artistic accomplishment. And the women are supposed to be flawed, with their issues and capacity for pettiness and so on no doubt being very much part of the point. Women are complicated human beings, people are judgmental because no one ever fully understands another's POV, society's attitudes about women mess with everyone's head, and so on. I get it. And, again, it did work better for me as the novel went on. But as a reading experience, it didn't exactly thrill me. Although it did leave me asking myself uncomfortable and thought-provoking questions about my own ability to sympathize with women whose experiences and desires differ significantly from my own, which I think is probably a worthwhile result in itself.

Anyway. Can't say I entirely enjoyed it, for reasons that might well be as much my fault as the author's, but I certainly did appreciate aspects of it, and in the end I'm not sorry I read it, anyway. ( )

Red Clocks is scarier for me than The Handmaid's Tale (which I loved!), because it isn't a dystopian novel, set in the future with a different societal setup. It is so frighteningly close to now that I can almost touch it. The legal manipulations going on in Texas and other states concerning abortion and women's rights are just small steps beyond this book. I am incensed and petrified and we have to pay attention. NOW. ( )