Ro is jealous of Susan's children, and Susan does not want Ro to conceive, or to publish her book. She has Ro over for dinner, but it is clear the two women do not get along very well. The wife plans to ask her husband, Didier, to go to marriage counseling with her. In the daughter's section, Mattie worries that her period is seven weeks late. She visits the mender for fertility medicine, and Gin suggests that Ro may have polycystic ovary syndrome. The biographer works at the high school, and learns that the principal's wife is in the hospital. The narrative returns to the biographer, who describes how the United States banned abortion and in vitro fertilization two years ago, and made it so that only married couples can adopt children. The next section describes the wife, Susan, imagining driving her car off a cliff, as well as seeing a burnt animal in the road. The novel jumps to the daughter, Mattie, who has sex with a boy from her high school class named Ephraim. The novel shifts to the mender, Gin, who reflects briefly on her falling out with Lola.
She is taking fertility medicine in order to conceive a child through intrauterine insemination, but she is a single 42-year-old woman and worries her chances of conception are slim. It then moves into a section from the perspective of the biographer, Ro.
The novel opens with a page of fragments detailing the birth of polar explorer Eivor Minervudottir in 1941, on the Faroe Islands. The arctic explorer who Ro is writing about is always called by her name, which is Eivor Minervudottir. The other three contemporary characters and their labels are as follows: Susan, who is the wife, Mattie, known as the daughter, and Gin, who is called the mender. Ro is referred to as the biographer in her sections, which are all titled "The Biographer." The other narrators only refer to her by her name when discussing her in their own sections. These labels are also the titles of their respective sections. The four contemporary characters all have names, but are referred to by specific labels in their own sections. The novel jumps back and forth between these five different perspectives, and each section from a contemporary narrator's point of view is sandwiched by excerpts from Ro's biography on the polar explorer. Four of the narrators are living at the same time in the same coastal Oregon town, while the fourth is a nineenth century arctic explorer, and the subject of a biography one of the narrators - Ro - is writing.
Red Clocks, by Leni Zumas, is told from the perspectives of five different women.
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