This week we’re thrilled to tell y’all, if you didn’t know already, that WriteByNight writing coach/consultant Carolyn Cohagan’s new YA novel, Time Zero (She Writes Press), is on shelves and getting some great media coverage.
Set in a
dystopian New York City in a nation run by misogynistic extremists, Time Zero features a 15-year-old protagonist who, thanks to her grandmother, has learned to read — which is in direct defiance of laws aimed at preventing the education of women.
Watch this trailer, then read on . . .
Carolyn wrote, in an April New York Times piece, every law in Time Zero that oppresses women is “taken from existing fundamentalist religions, including those that originate in the United States. Each rule that the heroine, Mina Clark, follows is governing the life of a girl somewhere in the world right
now.”
Carolyn says that she set out to write an entertaining page-turner, but that she also wanted to bring attention to the fact that even in some parts of the United States, women can be subjected to forced marriage, polygamy, laws forbidding them to drive, and more.
And yet, she writes in the Times, “many girls today are not involved with the fight for women’s rights. … So when I began to write Time Zero, I thought, ‘Let’s really examine what it means to not have rights as a woman, and let’s not just do it as sci-fi or fantasy. Let’s ground it in reality, so it can have real resonance.’
“I defy anyone, male or female,” Carolyn continues, “to read Time Zero and not be a feminist by the last page.”
Early reviews are: the New York Daily News labels Carolyn’s book “riveting and refreshing”; Publishers Weekly calls it a “powerfully realized dystopian
tale.”
Justine Duhr
Owner, WriteByNight
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