There are good numbers and there are bad. It will tell them how much follicle-stimulating hormone and estradiol and progesterone the biographer’s body is making. Here we go- got you.” Blood swooshes into the chamber. “Aunt Flo visited again, did she?” says Crabby. Luckily long sleeves are common in this part of the world. Months of needlework have streaked and darkened the insides of the biographer’s elbows. “Where are you, mister?” she asks the vein. “Happy Halloween,” she explains.Ĭrabby doesn’t find the vein straight off. Nurse Crabby wears a neon-pink wig and a plastic-strap contraption that exposes nearly all of her torso, including a good deal of breast. It is a simple, easy story that allows her not to think about what’s happening in the women’s heads, or in the heads of the husbands who sometimes accompany them.

This, anyway, is the story the biographer likes. They live on the fingers of women who have leather sofas and solvent husbands but whose cells and tubes and bloods are failing at their animal destiny. Before she is called to climb into stirrups and feel her vagina prodded with a wand that makes black pictures, on a screen, of her ovaries and uterus, the biographer sees every wedding ring in the room. She wears sweatpants, is white skinned and freckle cheeked, not young, not old.

In a room for women whose bodies are broken, Eivør Mínervudottír’s biographer waits her turn. This is a story of resilience, transformation, and hope in tumultuous - even frightening - times. In the vein of Margaret Atwood and Eileen Myles, Leni Zumas fearlessly explores the contours of female experience, evoking The Handmaid’s Tale for a new millennium. Red Clocks is at once a riveting drama, whose mysteries unfold with magnetic energy, and a shattering novel of ideas. And Gin is the gifted, forest-dwelling herbalist, or “mender,” who brings all their fates together when she’s arrested and put on trial in a frenzied modern-day witch hunt. Mattie is the adopted daughter of doting parents and one of Ro’s best students, who finds herself pregnant with nowhere to turn. Susan is a frustrated mother of two, trapped in a crumbling marriage.

Ro, a single high-school teacher, is trying to have a baby on her own, while also writing a biography of Eivv?r, a little-known 19th-century female polar explorer. In a small Oregon fishing town, five very different women navigate these new barriers alongside age-old questions surrounding motherhood, identity, and freedom. In this ferociously imaginative novel, abortion is once again illegal in America, in-vitro fertilization is banned, and the Personhood Amendment grants rights of life, liberty, and property to every embryo.įive women.

Leni zumas