📖: Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018)
🍸: Eivør’s ice
Why this book?
To wrap up Women’s History Month, we’d like to say THANK YOU to all of the women who have fought — and are still fighting — for gender equality and equity. Sadly, women’s reproductive rights are still in contention today, despite all the progress made in the last few decades.
This week’s book recommendation is Red Clocks, which imagines a not-so-far dystopian future where abortion and IVF are banned and single parents are no longer allowed to adopt. Much of the novel is confined to the inner thoughts of the five main female characters, who all wrestle with what it means to be an individual capable of creating new life. When Zumas focuses on the women’s narratives, her writing becomes punctuated with anxiously choppy and repetitive prose. Her clever use of repetition gives the work a mesmerizing, percussive quality — much like the relentless ticking of the “red clocks” that the women can hear and feel.
Why this drink?
Aside from the dystopian premise, the most compelling parts of Red Clocks include glimpses into the life of the 19th century polar explorer, Eivør Mínervudottír, whose story is told in parallel with the other four female main characters. This drink emulates the glaciers and other ice formations that Eivør studied during her arctic expeditions, where she discovered characteristics of polar ice.
Eivør’s ice
Ingredients:
2 oz vodka
3 oz ginger beer
0.5 oz blue curaçao
0.5 oz lime juice
0.5 oz ginger-infused simple syrup*
flat chunks of colored ice**
- combine vodka, blue curaçao, lime juice, and syrup into a shaker, and shake with ice
- pour into a rocks glass, straining out the ice
- top the mix with ginger beer, and stir
- serve with 1-2 large chunks of the colored ice
Pro-tips:
*how to make ginger-infused syrup: Pour white granulated sugar and water into a pan (using a 2:1 sugar-to-water ratio) and heat the mixture on the stove until it starts to bubble. Once tiny bubbles start to appear, immediately take the boiling syrup off the stove and pour it into the into a glass jar with 1-2 tablespoons of grated ginger. Cover the jar with airtight lid until cool.
**how to make colored ice: Take sandwich-sized ziploc bags and fill them one-third of the way with filtered water. Add 1-2 tablespoons of butterfly pea flower tea or blue curaçao. Alternatively, you may use 5-8 drops of blue food coloring. Whatever you use for the blue coloring, make sure that the color is dispersed and dissolved in the water before you freeze them. Lay the ziploc bags flat in the freezer. Once frozen, strike the ice with a sturdy wooden spatula or rolling pin to break it up into chunks.
Another round, please! 🥂
You might also like:
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
mixaphoria.com 