Red Clocks

Once I picked this up and started reading, I read it straight through in a single day. The story is told through the lives of five women who have different connections to motherhood in a small Oregon town. In the recent past of this book, laws have changed to make abortion and in vitro fertilization illegal. Life is legally defined as beginning at conception, and embryos are endowed with rights to life, liberty, and property. Also, looming in the novel is a new law about to take effect in the new year that restricts the right to adopt a child to married couples only.

In this situation, we meet “the biographer,” a history teacher at the local high school, a single woman who is trying to become pregnant via sperm donor. She is also writing a biography of a female Arctic explorer of the 19th century who was forced to have her work published under a male colleague's name, because no one believed it was her own work.

There is also “the wife,” a married woman with two small children who is dealing with despair about her marriage. “The daughter” is a 14 year old girl who was adopted into a happy home and feels she can't tell her parents about her accidental pregnancy. “The mender” is a woman who grew up in the town and has been dismissed as “stupid” (she didn't finish high school),”crazy” (she prefers to live on her own in the forest with only the trees and animals for company), or a “witch” (people come to her for herbal remedies).

I liked the way this book showed this group of women dealing with the problems of their lives against a background of a repressive political reality in a non-preachy way. I didn't want to read a novel about how bad a repressive society is. Instead, this is a novel that shows women grappling with the question, “What is my life for?”–much more interesting!

I did wonder whether, in the universe of the novel, same sex marriages would be recognized as legitimate, and whether same sex couples would be able to adopt. I also wondered whether a teen mother would be able to keep her baby after the “Every Child Needs 2 (parents)” law took effect. I felt like these were obvious questions that should have been addressed (especially since there was a pregnant teen who would be giving birth after the law took effect), so it made the book feel less finished to me.

Still, I really enjoyed it.