WHEN SHE WOKE

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Hillary Jordan admits using Hawthorne's THE SCARLET LETTER as an inspiration for WHEN SHE WOKE. For those with a poor memory, Hester Prynne is forced to wear a scarlet letter "A" after committing adultery with her minister.

In WHEN SHE WOKE fundamentalist Christians have usurped power in America. Any woman caught having had an abortion procedure is "chromed" or injected with a red gene. Child molesters are colored blue; other less serious felons are turned yellow.

The main character Hannah Payne must endure thirty days of solitude, an ordeal most "reds" can't endure. She has refused to name her lover, the new Minister of Faith, Aidan Dale. From solitary she is sent to a kind of halfway house for "reds" run by a couple of religious fanatics who make Pat Robertson look like an agnostic. They try to rehabilitate Hannah or "brainwash," whichever you prefer. Hannah makes friends with Kayla, a kind of smart aleck who has lost whatever respect for Christianity she once had. Eventually Hannah can't take it anymore and leaves, leaving herself prey to a group called "The Fist" that targets "reds" for even more abuse. Hair-raising adventures ensue.

It can't be a coincidence that Jordan's setting is Texas, where the State Board of Education is run by fundamentalist Christians. Several other events make for a dystopia. Men and women were rendered sterile by a STD (later cured) that made abortion even more abhorrent, and Iran dropped a nuke on Los Angeles, killing 700,000 people.

Is a 2012 retelling of THE SCARLET LETTER worth reading? Would fundamentalist Christians really do this sort of thing if they gained power? Jordan further complicates matters with overcrowded prisons needing a solution. "Chromes" who would ordinarily be in jail are now branded as somebody you need to watch (and discriminate against). Jordan also includes an anecdote in her acknowledgments about her uncle suggesting that drugs ought to be legalized, but that anybody who takes them ought to turn blue.

I'd definitely recommend this novel, mainly because it's about something significant. I'd even give it five stars if it wasn't for the somewhat wishy-washy ending.



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