Will I love Red Clocks?

This sly, feminist satire posits that everything is tied to reproduction.

Zumas must have read widely before thinking out loud in print about everything from love, sex, birth, life, love, loss, loneliness, and death to small things that seem inconsequential but make sense within the tale she spins.

Narrated in a cycle by four women, the core of the novel imagines a world where abortion is banned and women are surveilled—but with absurd legal twists and deadpan irony. Zumas blends social commentary with magical realism to deliver a novel that disturbs the reader with inconvenient truths and difficult questions.

I’ll read anything with motherhood as an overarching theme.

Set in a near-future America, this novel explores the lives of women dealing with the consequences of legislation restricting reproductive rights. Multiple narrative threads and alternating perspectives offer a complex and interconnected look at the lives of its characters.

America, not long from now. Abortion is banned, so is in vitro fertilization, and a new Amendment to the Constitution grants the right to life—to every embryo, that is. Red Clocks follows the impact of this new regime upon the lives of five women, all living in a small town on the Oregon Coast. The focus is on the personal—but then the personal is always political. 

In this novel, abortion is illegal, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment gives the constitutional right to life, liberty, and property to a fertilized egg from the moment of conception. Abortion providers can be charged with second-degree murder, abortion seekers with conspiracy to commit murder. I find this scenario terrifying. Of the five women depicted in this novel, a teacher who is single is trying to get pregnant through intrauterine insemination while writing a book about a female Arctic explorer; her student becomes unhappily pregnant; her married friend is overwhelmed by motherhood; and the other is an herbalist… show more.

This is one of those books that gives you an unsettling sense of “this could happen tomorrow.” Abortion is banned nationwide; in-vitro fertilization is illegal, and a constitutional amendment grants full rights to every embryo. Women are not turned into handmaids a la Margaret Atwood’s imagination; life goes on much as it does today, but these societal restrictions—and the intense penalties for violating them—hang heavy over each character’s head. There is darkness aplenty in a world like this, but a close look also reveals kindness and connection.