Instead, throughout their respective sections, Ro is called the biographer, Mattie the daughter, Susan the wife, and Gin the mender. Intertwined with Ro’s narrative are the stories of four other women: Mattie Quarles, a fifteen-year-old adopted daughter who finds herself pregnant by a callow youth who dumps her a few months later Susan Korsmo, the exhausted wife of a petulant French teacher named Didier and mother of their two children Gin Percival, a healer who lives in the forest outside the town, alone with her goats and her pet cat, doling out tinctures and perceptive reproductive advice to the women who visit her and Eivør Mínervudottír, a pioneering polar explorer in the 19th century about whom Ro is writing a book.īut, in a clever formal twist, we don’t know the names of the characters when they’re introduced to us. Her options narrowing by the day, Ro becomes increasingly frantic. She’s also on file at an adoption agency, though her window is quickly closing as Every Child Needs Two nears enactment. Kalbfleisch, injects her with sperm from a sperm donor, she’ll have a better chance of conceiving. She takes mood-altering medication so that every time she ovulates and her impersonal doctor, Dr. There are few options remaining for her and she pursues them. Trapped in this web of curtailed liberties is Ro Stephens, a woman in a small coastal Oregon town called Newville, who’s forty-two, single, and desperate to have a child.

And as the book progresses, a new law looms on the horizon: Every Child Needs Two, a perfectly chilling name for a piece of legislation that prevents anyone but married couples from adopting children. This heavily enforced border is called the Pink Wall. (The embryos can’t give their consent to be moved.)” When women seeking abortions head north to Canada, the US and Canadian governments reach an agreement to apprehend all women who look like they might be pregnant and send them back to be prosecuted.

In vitro fertilization is illegal, too-“the amendment outlaws the transfer of embryos from laboratory to uterus. Abortion, now tantamount to murder, is outlawed. That logic expands and becomes a whole complement of encroaching strictures. The new president’s first act is to pass something called the Personhood Amendment, which grants a fertilized egg at conception the same rights-life, liberty, and property-as every citizen in the United States. And unlike real administrations, where agendas get stalled in the vagaries of lawmaking, the hyper-conservative administration in Red Clocks is ruthlessly effective. The book is loudly, unapologetically political. Red Clocks, Leni Zumas’s fierce, well-formed, hilarious, and blisteringly intelligent novel, is squarely a piece of Trump-era art, a product of the past two trying years in which the main players either brag about sexual assault or won’t even associate with women to whom they aren’t married.

Red clocks zumas