Red Clocks

October 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.

November 1, 2017
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, Eivor 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.

COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Erin Bennett and Karissa Vacker work seamlessly together to narrate this much-anticipated dystopian novel. Focusing on the interlocking stories of four women, plus one forgotten woman from the eighteenth century, the author posits an America in which women have been deprived of the freedom to choose to have abortions, adopt, or give birth as single mothers. Rather than divide up the characters, the two narrators portray some of same ones. They complement each other in their character development, giving them added depth and dimension. Their delivery of dialogue is efficient and effectively maintains the mood and atmosphere of the various threads of the plot. J.E.M. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Starred review from November 1, 2017
Imagine a world in which Roe v. Wade has been overturned, and you have the premise of Zumas' shattering new novel in which abortion seekers are charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and abortion providers with second-degree murder. The novel introduces four women whose interconnected lives are negatively impacted by the new law. There is Ro, an unmarried high-school teacher desperate to be a mother before a law forbidding single people to adopt goes into effect; her 15-year-old student Mattie, who is pregnant and equally desperate, but for an abortion; Gin, an herbalist, regarded locally as a witch, whose herbs are believed to have the power to terminate pregnancy; and Susan, who, with two children, is trapped in a loveless marriage but feels herself too weak to end it. With its strong point of view, the novel, in lesser hands, might have been reduced to agitprop, but Zumas has raised it, instead, to the level of literature, which readers will find deeply moving. The characters are beautifully realized, inviting empathy and understanding; the richly realized plot is compulsively readable, and the theme, with its echoes of Margaret Atwood, is never didactic but invites thought and discussion. The result is powerful and timely.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from October 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 Eivor, 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

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2018

Zumas's far too timely novel, based on actual suggestions made by politicians, considers an America where abortion is a crime, single women are no longer allowed to adopt, and IVF (in vitro fertilization) is illegal because fertilized eggs are unable to consent to being moved from a medical facility to a uterus. Four central characters are identified mainly by their roles: the Biographer, the Daughter, the Mender, and the Wife. Ro, the Biographer, is single. She has exhausted all of her attempts to conceive, and time is ticking on the likelihood of adoption. Her student Mattie, the Daughter, has sex once and finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy that will ruin her plans for a scholarly future. The Mender, Gin, is a healer of women in need who comes to the attention of men in power and faces a literal witch hunt. The Wife, Susan, is so unfulfilled by her life as wife and mother that she frequently fantasizes about driving herself and her children off a cliff. Their stories intertwine in many ways, with the women often jealous of one another or being their own worst critics. The matter-of-fact storytelling style makes the grim realities of each woman's existence even more tragic, with their lack of choice disabling in every way. Narrators Karissa Vacker and Erin Bennett have very similar voices, and it can be difficult to differentiate between them. However, their implacable tones and unemotional narration add to the inevitability of the events. While the content is difficult to listen to, this production is riveting and all too relevant. VERDICT Highly recommended for all collections. ["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": LJ 10/15/17 starred review of the Little, Brown hc.]--B. Allison Gray, Goleta P.L., CA

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.