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.

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