Vox
Vox is Christina Dalcher's 2018 debut novel, a near-future dystopia that imagines an America in which a Christian-nationalist administration has, within the space of a single year, stripped women and girls of nearly all civil rights and limited them to one hundred spoken words per day, enforced by a small wrist counter that delivers an escalating electric shock for any word over the limit. Dr. Jean McClellan, the narrator, was once a leading cognitive linguist studying Wernicke's aphasia. She is now silent in her own kitchen, watching her six-year-old daughter learn to whisper. When the president's brother suffers a stroke that destroys his ability to produce language, Jean is briefly conscripted back into her old laboratory under armed guard, and given the chance to use her work for purposes she cannot yet name. Dalcher draws openly on Atwood and on the Roe v. Wade-era arguments she heard as a linguistics graduate student.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Vox
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
In a near-future America taken over by the Pure movement, every female citizen wears a wrist counter that delivers an electric shock past one hundred spoken words a day.
Yes. It imagines a near-future United States where women are limited to 100 spoken words per day. It is frequently shelved alongside The Handmaid's Tale.
No. It is a standalone, though Dalcher has written follow-up dystopians Q and Femlandia in the same thematic vein.
Vox is 32 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Vox takes most readers under an hour to finish.
Vox is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Vox is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.