“Red Clocks” might sound like a dystopian novel, but plenty of conservative politicians are plotting to make it a work of nonfiction. In fact, the author, Leni Zumas, has said that she drew the most frightening details of her story’s misogynistic world from “actual proposals” by men who are currently in control of our government.Such is the state of affairs in the early 21st century. Feminist writers of speculative fiction don’t need the bizarre rituals of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 classic, “The Ha...

I have mixed feelings about “Red Clocks”.......disturbing issues ......disturbing ‘choice’ vagina dialogues...yet all in the context of brilliance- timely & important. My review reflects my thoughts and feelings which came from reading “Red Clocks”. I admire the creative writing style: seriously I do, but it was challenging for me to feel a close intimate connection to the women and their stories. I wanted to feel them deeper in my gut - not just intellectualize their situations. I did a few tim...

I can see why this is getting so much coverage after the recent tv success of The Handmaid's Tale coinciding with a veritable flood of news coverage that has highlighted the position of women as second class citizens all over the world. Inevitably, books which use this kind of near-future/dystopia to address contemporary issues, eg The Power, are going to be the next big thing. The problem is that that's how this book feels, like it was written as an experiment to fill a publishing hole- while t...

My thoughts on this are all jumbled up; I thought I would adore this and it is not a bad book by any means but it took me three months to finish this. I could just not get on board and I am not quite sure where my problems lie.I love the plausibility of the world Leni Zumas has created here, it feels organic in a way that is scary and frustrating. Set in the not so distant future, reproductive rights have been severely limited: abortion is illegal in all and every circumstances (and in fact cons...

I guess we can probably expect more of these weird feminist(?) dystopias in the wake of The Handmaid's Tale's Hulu series. Between this and the superhero-movie-turned-superhero-book trend, you can pretty much predict the new book trends based on what's popular on the big and small screens.Here, Zumas imagines a United States where the Personhood Amendment gives rights to unborn embryos, outlawing abortion and IVF (because said embryos cannot give consent). The Canadian government assist by erect...

RED CLOCKS by Leni Zumas - Thank you so much to Little, Brown and Company for providing my free copy - all opinions are my own. This novel is outstanding! I have not read another book like this. Yes, it’s feminist—in the sense that these women rule their own lives within the confines of the law. Yes, it’s dystopian—in the sense that these same laws are not in effect in the United States today. But, this story was the most realistic dystopian novel I’ve ever read. Red Clocks takes place in the ne...

How weird to be reading this book on my least-favorite commuting day of the year, when the annual March for Life is held in DC and I have to resist the urge to yell at people to get the eff out of my way on the Metro. This is getting billed as a dystopian novel to cash in on Handmaid hysteria, but it's really not that much of a stretch from our current environment, given that abortion access is being so severely curtailed in many states. The leaders of Zumas' world, though, have taken it a step

I circled around this book for a long time, not wanting to read another dystopian breeder novel. But I eventually decided to try it, and I'm glad I did. Told through multiple perspectives (all female), this is a near future dystopia with very probably legislation that outlaws abortion, IVF, and adoption outside of straight married couples for the entire country. The female characters are known first as these new archetypes - the Mender, the Wife, the Biographer, the Daughter, etc. As the story u...

Well, I am going to admit I was a little skeptical of this book going in. Any book that draws comparisons to The Handmaids Tale is bound to come off second best in my experience. Last years "female dystopia" de jour The Power just didn't do it for me, so I was a little worried for Red Clocks.However, I needn't have worried, Red Clocks is a beautifully written, gloriously weird and at times funny character study of five women. This world that Zumas has created feels very much like the world we li...

Just wanted to recommend this book to people struggling with recent political events. I pretty much ONLY feel like reading feminist dystopian fiction at this point, but this is a rare example of a book in that genre that retains a sliver of ever-more elusive hope. This book is also, in comparison to other recent examples in the genre, compellingly down to earth and credible - now even more so - as the author based its premise on actual legislation proposed by the likes of those currently empower...

Red Clocks can be described as a dystopian novel, but it feels entirely contemporary. Instead of creating a far-off dystopian society, Leni Zumas picks up on trends in our current political climate and thinks them through. What are the consequences of making abortion illegal in the US? How does a woman trying to have a baby on her own navigate a world in which in vitro fertilization is banned and only married couples are allowed to adopt? Where do larger concepts of woman- and motherhood come in...

Zumas creates women with lovely endearing individuality and humaneness. I was concerned for their welfare and wanted them to turn out to have happy lives, almost to the degree that I feel about characters in Kent Haruf's novels. On the downside the characters's story arcs were not particularly interesting and their reactions to menstrual-related events never strayed much beyond the obvious, with the exception of the mender, whom I adored. Too bad her dramatic arc was wrapped up in a B movie plot...

It took me a bit to figure out how this book worked. But once I did, I liked it. It's a story about a VERY possible near future where single women can't adopt, or get in vitro, and no one can get safe abortions because they're illegal. So basically, it's the US pre-1973. And that is frightening.

I could go on, and on, and on, and on about this book, but really the most important thing I can say is that this is now an all-time favorite. It is absolutely brilliant, and I expect to see it not only on "Best Books of the Year" lists, but also "Best Books of the Decade." It's that good.We follow five different women whose lives interweave in a small coastal town in Oregon. Their world, though very similar to our own, has passed a "Personhood Amendment" recognizing fetuses as full citizens. Th...

DNFed at 20%. I just couldn't get into it!

Red Clocks is a quietly dystopian novel. There has been no war, no plague, no machine gunning down of the senate. Instead, the world Zumas creates is eerily similar to our own. All that has changed is a pro-life government signed a bill into law while the majority of the country sat at home and thought it could never happen. Sound familiar? Uncomfortable yet? Red Clocks feels eerily possible and that possibility is the novel’s strength. Speculative fiction is best when you believe we could take

**3.5-stars**From the very first pages, I knew this book was unique; so much so, it's actually a little hard to describe. Or, if I'm being honest, wrap my head around.The novel follows the perspectives of four different women, plus a fifth historical perspective, who are all loosely connected to one another. Mainly, we follow these women through vignettes of their lives, as they grapple with difficult choices based on their gender, or sexuality. I went into this book thinking that it was set in

All sorts of things are all over the place. I'm supposed to decipher it? Really? Overall this didn't feel like a readable material. At all. DNF. I don't want to torture myself with it anymore. It's probably very forward and front-looking and experimental and feminist and corresponds to a bunch of other buzz-words, still it's incomprehensible. It's like a bunch of books got intermixed along with some other material, probably (including oversized to-do lists, random thoughts and all sorts of note

”The sea does not ask permission or wait for instruction. It doesn’t suffer from not knowing what on earth, exactly, it is meant to do. Today its walls are high, white lather torn, crashing hard at the sea stacks. ‘Angry sea,’ people say, but to the biographer the ascribing of human feeling to a body so inhumanly itself is wrong. The water heaves up for reasons they don’t have names for.” ”She was just quietly teaching history when it happened. Woke up one morning to a president-elect she

Sorry, SF fans, this one isn't SF no matter how it might be billed that way. There is ONE alteration to reality and it's only a legal one. Abortions are outlawed. The rest is, as they say, history.Enter into a novel about vaginas. Names are missing because it's popular to write about real people as only their roles. Other than that, it feels like popular fiction, complete with disgruntled housewives, teachers who dream of having children but are denied, little girls who get pregnant and must suf...