She’s torn by a love for her family, especially her sister Becca, and she still loves the man with whom she had the affair, a surprisingly sympathetic (and, problematically, married) young high-profile church leader, who’s likeiwse tormented by his role in her punishment and still desperately in love with her. The outside world is not kind to Reds like Hannah, and many are kidnapped, sold into slavery or prostitution, or murdered by vigilantes in a group called The Fist, to which her brother-in-law belongs. After a month she’ll be released from this high-tech prison and sent back into the real world, where other criminals like her must try to survive in regular society, their skin dyed to denote their crime.
In dystopian future Texas this is a felony, and her punishment is that her skin has been medically dyed red for the next 16 years.Ī bold and gripping re-imagination of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter,” with shades of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Hillary Jordan’s “When She Woke” follows Hannah as she decides the next steps in a life that seems suddenly like it will crush her. She holds her hands above her face, finding them “starkly alien as starfish.” This is a shock but not a surprise - she knows why she is in this mirrored cell, why she has been “chromed” : she terminated a pregnancy and refused to name either the doctor who did it or the father.
A 26-year-old woman named Hannah awakens on an operating table and finds herself red - not just red, but Red, her skin entirely “the color of newly shed blood,” from her scalp to her toes.
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