Hannah, a twenty-six-year-old woman, belongs to a Christian mega-church and firmly believes in its teachings. Our protagonist is Hannah Payne (her name is a reworking of Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne). “Chromes” are released back into the world to be shunned, abused, and often hunted. For abortion (and murder in general), the color is red (which lines up with the scarlet letter “A” for adultery that Hawthorne’s heroine has to wear pinned to her clothes). Since prisons are too expensive and recidivism rates are too high to bother keeping people locked up, convicted criminals now undergo “melachroming,” a procedure where their skin is dyed a color that announces their crime for the period of their sentence. However, the punishment for having an abortion – and the punishment for all crimes in general – is no longer incarceration. Wade is overturned and abortion is now considered murder. There, after a sterility-inducing, sexually-transmitted epidemic ravages the world’s childbearing women, a fundamentalist Christian theocracy has assumed power (a setting very similar to Atwood’s). Still, some reviewers praise the work: “Jordan’s passionate and vivid writing” and its “unflinching imagining of a bleak future.” The setting is a horrible future Texas. Critics worry that although the story Jordan creates has flashes of original and inspired ideas, by combining these two much-admired works, the author finds it hard to find her own voice under the weight of previous masters.

She also brings in elements from another well-known work in this genre – Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Author Hillary Jordan bases her work on a futuristic update of a classic novel – Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Published in 2011, When She Woke is a young adult novel in the dystopian sci-fi genre.

When she woke