VOX by Christina Dalcher

Imagine that our country’s leaders have decided in the past year that women should not speak more than 100 words per day.  In this novel they enforce this limit by requiring all women to wear a metal wrist counter that delivers a nasty shock if the wearer exceeds her maximum word count.  Women no longer study anything in school except rudimentary arithmetic and home ec.  Jean, our first-person narrator, is a neurolinguist who was researching a cure for a brain disorder that causes language dysfunction.  However, women can no longer hold jobs, and Jean just did not see this dystopian development coming.  Then she is suddenly called back into service to finish her work, alongside her two colleagues--Lorenzo, who also happens to be her lover and the father of her unborn child, and Lin, whom Jean has not seen since their work was discontinued.  Jean fears that her unborn child will be a girl whose language skills will be stifled just as her 6-year-old daughter’s are now.  Jean also has three sons who are starting to drink the Kool-Aid of the misogynists, and her husband, the president’s science advisor, is on her side but not necessarily willing to make waves.  Soon she and her teammates discover the true nefarious purpose of their research, complicating matters even further.  This book is stunning in many ways and points up all sorts of sticky issues, including Jean’s growing resentment and distrust of the men in her family, as she and Lorenzo hatch a possible plot to get out of the country before the baby is born.  Although we know from the first sentence that Jean will succeed in overthrowing the government in a week, the book is still suspenseful and a bit madcap, as we learn that she has more sympathizers to her cause than she realizes.