I think that the comparison this book has to 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a thoroughly valid one in this case, and so it carries both the benefits and drawbacks of the book as well. There are a lot of social commentaries to be found here, all of it very poignant and valid, but it was still vague and frustrating, and it left me wishing that there would have been a little more detail in the society that was illustrated. I found it hard to connect to the characters with so little surrounding them, and it bothered me that there was that vague, impassive connection to the story as well- as a reader, it felt like looking through a foggy window at something I couldn't quite see.

With that said, I loved the setting and the story throughout. It develops a world that is largely credible and brings with it the debate surrounding reproductive rights, women's bodily autonomy, and the medicalisation of female bodies as well. There's a lot of good material here, it's just a matter of hashing it out a bit more and making it a little less vague. The characters could do with a little more developing too, but as with 'The Water Cure', the language is beautiful and poignant and carries with it a sense of menace. This was a good book with the potential to be a great book- it's just a shame that it didn't quite get there.

‘Blue Ticket’ by Sophie Mackintosh tells the story of Calla, a woman who from the day of her ‘first bleed’ is decreed to have her freedom, but no children. In this dystopian novel, in which babies are so prized that people pushing prams are stopped repeatedly on the street and given gifts and money, only a small number of women are driven away from the station to become mothers. The rest must make the long treacherous walk to the city to earn their freedom.
Early in the novel we are told that Calla’s deceased mother had hoped she would receive a blue ticket and therefore her freedom. However, over time Calla develops more and more of a yearning to be a mother. The novel explores this desire and highlights the difference between it, and what we describe as maternal instinct. Calla does not have maternal instinct, and repeatedly places herself at risk, emotionally, physically, and sexually. However, she continues to be driven to have a child and act as a white ticket woman.
I was initially drawn to this novel, but over time I started to find it frustrating. I wanted to know more about the world in which this lottery is created, but the focus of the story is upon Calla and her fight to have a child. I also found it difficult to sympathise with a woman who was prepared repeatedly to put herself at unnecessary risk and I could not warm to her as a character. It is beautifully written, and a very thoughtful meditation on womanhood and motherhood, but it didn’t win my heart.

There are two paths a girl can take in life, and both are governed by a lottery. A white ticket will see her with a baby, a husband, and a loving home. A blue ticket will see this future disallowed to her and she will be cast out into the world to make for herself what she can. For the teen girls who receive their lottery ticket the latter feels like freedom, but to some of the women they become it feels more like a nightmare.

Calla is one such woman. She spends her days at repetitive work and her nights sipping overly sweet wine until the edges of reality blur and fade to black altogether only for a new day to begin and herald a repeat of all those that came before. She is looking for something that can’t be found in strings of men and women, the cigarettes she chain smokes, or the empty bottles that litter her spare apartment. She is looking for the one future the blue ticket held inside her locket forbids her from.

I appreciated how this unsettling dystopian tale opened up ideas of femininity and motherhood, and how the two are often wrongly interlinked. The women denied the latter are over-sexualised and sold a shallow way of living that kept meaningful conversation and loving contact at bay. The white ticket women are overly-protected from this but are coddled and cosseted in the domestic sphere, instead. Maybe some are happy with their fate, but most are too brain-washed into thinking no other future is viable, for them to begin to question that.

Whilst I adored all this novel set out to do and the startlingly bleak future reality constructed, I found the concept was both the nexus and the entire focus of the novel. This was a largely slow-paced, personal character study of the protagonist, that used one individual’s plight to speak volumes for the untold number of women just like her. It was quite like the renowned The Handmaid’s Tale in that respect. Whilst I understand why the focus was so introspective and individualised I also longed for something else. Only I’m not exactly sure what it was that was missing for me, personally.

It was always going to be hard to follow up the brilliant, The Water Cure. Blue Ticket is about a lottery which applies only to women when they reach puberty; they are given a blue (no children) and white (children) ticket. The main character is Calla, a blue ticket, and her need for a child. What this is really about is freedom - in the world of the book, women can’t decide if they want child or not. The Blues feel the whites are better off and the White that the Blues are. It’s an intriguing novel which is both beautiful and confusing. Not as brilliant as her first but well written and pulled me back in every time I picked it up.

Sophie Mackintosh's new novel - about a world in which pubescent girls draw a white or blue ticket to determine whether or not they will become a mother - will inevitably be compared to Atwood's speculative fiction. But there's a distinct lack of world-building in "Blue Ticket": the eponymous tickets are more the starting point for an exploration of motherhood than they are the basis of a fully-imagined fictional world.

The scant information we do learn about this world feels more like metaphor than dystopian reality. Womanhood is depicted as a series of physical journeys which our protagonist is forced to undertake: adolescence an isolated journey towards the big city of adulthood, pregnancy a dangerous journey towards a hazily understood destination. I'm not one for unnecessary backstory and description, but for me Mackintosh's vagueness about how and why these important journeys occur drew too much attention to the crudeness of her central construct.

I found myself wondering what this novel would have been like freed from the shackles of its guiding thought experiment, because at its heart this is a rich, nuanced and evocatively-written exploration of womanhood and motherhood. The ticket system is based upon a reductive categorisation of women either as mothers or as pleasure-seeking nymphomaniacs; Mackintosh complicates this binary with characters who desire something other than that which their ticket determines, yet who are conflicted about their desires and uncertain about their decisions to act on them. Ideas of choice, free will, and the difficulty of divorcing what we really want from what we're told to want are interestingly explored, albeit somewhat heavy-handedly.

Maybe I was too influenced by reading Rachel Cusk's "A Life's Work" directly before this, but I would have preferred to see Mackintosh apply her skilful prose to essays on these key themes, rather than tying them up in a novel whose world-building failed to convince me.

Following on from her hauntingly beautiful 2018 novel The Water Cure, Blue Ticket is another stunning meditation on femininity, love, loss and the boundaries of the female body. While The Water Cure took sisterhood as its lens, Blue Ticket is a powerful and prescient exploration of the relationship between womanhood and motherhood. It is a world where the lives of women are determined by the pot-luck act of choosing one of two tickets, aged 12, that sets out the “choice” open to them as a woman: to be able to reproduce or not. Calla, a blue ticket, is our protagonist, a woman struggling to accept her lot and yearning for another path. Without giving too much away, it is one of the most accurate accounts I have read of the interior - psychological and physiological - experience of pregnancy. Dystopia is clearly Mackintosh’s (dis)comfort zone and Blue Ticket is reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, Never Let Me Go and Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. Like them, dystopia is the perfect format for commenting on our contemporary world; the illusion of choice, the judgments and proscriptions made on girls and women, their bodies and their lives. I’ll be thinking about this novel for quite some time.

Many thanks to Penguin and NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

A dystopian feminist tale that revolves around the tickets girls are given when they enter womanhood. They may either receive a white or blue ticket, in which they will then live out very different lives. An eerie novel about maternity, female identity and being in control of their own bodies and destiny. The writing is sterile, methodical and entrancing, just as the plotline is. The way it's written adds to the atmosphere and visualisation of the women's lives. Very well executed and easy to fly through! Fans of Margaret Atwood are going to love this!

I enjoyed the concept of Blue Ticket, about how the lives of women, the paths they choose, are handed out to them without debate. The use of a random lottery to determine whether they will get married, have children etc. Or whether they'll live a free life that's completely theirs. Although I wish there'd have been an alternative view point from someone with a different colour ticket, I think that would allowed the novel to gain a further dimension.

I felt that the writing lacked something more emotional, as I've said the execution of the storyline felt clean, sterile - although that fits in with the fictional world within these pages, I just wanted to have that emotive side that motherhood embraces - both positive and negative. I think if that box had been ticked, for me it would have been higher than a 3 star rating.

That being said, Sophie is a writer who can draw you into a tale, I finished Blue Ticket in one sitting and will definitely go back and read The Water Cure.

Another good one from Sophie.
A brilliant but freaky idea.
Well written and I felt like I was on the journey .

Great for book groups

Sophie Mackintosh’s first novel, The Water Cure, announced an assured and confident voice in literary fiction and was deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018.
Her second novel, Blue Ticket, revisits a similar dystopian world where all the usual facets of normal life are turned upside down. Calla, like all girls knows that when her first period comes she’ll take part in the Lottery: if she gets a white ticket she is suitable for motherhood; if her ticket is blue then she escapes this future and can make her own decisions. Only she can’t choose to be a mother. But what if she feels the overwhelming biological urge to have a child? This chilling novel follows Calla as she comes to terms with what her body is telling her, and follows her on a journey that takes her far away from safety and comfort.
Blue Ticket is not a lengthy novel but it packs a huge emotional punch and makes the reader question free will, a woman’s right to choose and the tyranny of patriarchy. Sophie Mackintosh uses a pared-down language that is utterly convincing and often very beautiful. This is a haunting novel with overtones of The Handmaid’s Tale or Brave New World but, as in The Water Cure, the reader is left with a sense of the strength of the human spirit. I recommend this novel without reservation.
It will be published at the end of August 2020.

I didn’t know what to expect from this book, but honestly I thoroughly enjoyed it. It follows Calla, from when she first gets her period and is then given a ticket- white means you go on to have children, blue means you don’t. Calla gets a blue ticket and immediately has a device fitted- presumably a coil- to prevent her getting pregnant. She is then given a survival kit and sent out to find her place among the world. Admittedly this part felt quite far fetched, but the writing is so good that I just wanted to know what would happen. Calla seems to be on a path of self destruction, and we follow her as she makes a choice that will ultimately lead to her being outcast. This book won’t leave you with a positive feeling, it is of course a dystopia, it is full of destruction and bitterness and unfairness. Nonetheless it drags you in. I had to know what would happen to Calla and read this book in two days, desperate to find out. A great book for fans of The Handmaids Tale and Vox.

Feminist dystopian story of Calla who, on menstruating, is taken to receive not a white (motherhood) but a blue (freedom) ticket (put inside a locket). She gets an IUD and goes to the city. But Calla wants to make her own choices so is banished. The book is over twelve months eighteen years after the lottery. Calla decides to remove the IUD and get pregnant. It is a literary novel and the prose is beautiful and I enjoyed following Calla on her journey. Thanks to #Netgalley for a review copy. This review appears on amazon.

I absolutely loved reading The Water Cure and had been eagerly anticipating Sophie Mackintosh’s next book ever since. I wasn’t disappointed. Blue ticket is full of the same ethereal and haunting mystery that she is becoming known for as a writer.

Calla, the protagonist, knows from the second that she hits puberty that she has not been selected to be a mother. The novel questions our preconceptions of motherhood in a way reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale, and whether or not it should be everyone’s right to have a child.

As the reader, you are given only glimpses into the parts of Calla’s world that she takes for granted, but these are echoed in the similarly tiny snapshots of information that she has about things we all know by heart. This delicate balance is magical, and is one of the things that makes Sophie Mackintosh’s writing stand out.

Blue Ticket is heartbreaking, but is beautiful and poignant every step of the way.

Left review on Goodreads too.

This book follows our main character Calla in an undisclosed time or location. In this dystopian style novel, when a girl has her first period she participates in a lottery and will be allocated either a blue or white ticket. Blue representing a life which will focus on a career and freedom and white representing motherhood and family life.

Our protagonist draws a blue ticket but throughout the story we follow her on her path to questioning destiny and freedom of choice. This is a very interesting read and premise but I didn’t feel like it was as impactful as it could have been. The lack of dialogue is a little unusual throughout the book and there is little world building.

Overall I’d give it a 3/5.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

This is probably the most disturbing book I've read so far this year. The colour of a piece of paper allocated to you decides if you become a mother or not and basically determines your life. No choices, no options. "Blue Ticket" is brilliantly written, and a very enjoyable read. I have a lot of unanswered questions though (the roles of men and why this is happening, etc. are not clear), so it's only 4 stars from me.

My thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for an advance copy to review. This review is entirely my own, unbiased, opinion.

2.5 rounded up

Mackinstosh has written a quiet but at times thought-provoking feminist dystopia set in a world where young women are granted tickets - a white ticket means you can become a mother and are part of the highest strata of society, while a blue ticket means you become "free" (while being forcibly inserted with a coil-like device to prevent pregnancy).

Our protagonist Calla is the recipient of a blue ticket, and leads a hedonistic lifestyle of drinking and sleeping around, later going on to date a man named R. But Calla starts to want more out of life, and this is where things pick up as she has to begin a life on the run.

While I don't usually like books written in this style - vague with minimal world building and description - I thought it worked well here: Mackintosh gives just enough away to let you fill in the grim blanks with your imagination. While I found it well-paced I finished feeling a little disappointed, and the novel lacked a certain something which would have made it stand out from what is now a frankly oversaturated genre.

This book is bemusing, to say the least. It has such an interesting premise but I felt let down by the actual story. We're told pretty much from the beginning that the assigning of tickets is from a lottery, so I'm not sure why after the lottery happens we're subjected to 95% of Calla's ramblings and how she was *meant* to be a mother and how x thought or y thought meant she was good enough or not. It's a damn lottery and it was based on any factor of being a human being? It's also boring that the person who doesn't get chosen to be a mother wants to be a mother. Like yes, of course, there's room for loads of exploration in that but it's straight forward and boring, particularly because Calla was boring. Your typical 'I don't care about anything' attitude, only to find *surprise* she does care and she does want a baby.

The book also lacked a lot of world-building, you don't know anything about the state of the world in this book, why are the women assigned tickets? Why do those assigned blue tickets have to then go out in the world and "make it on their own?" they are like 14! The world they live in is the same as ours but we never find out what is happening and what society is like in general. The writing by large promotes a very disjointed feel, and this is okay in some cases but I didn't like the story so I felt even further detached from it. Calla reads like a thirteen-year-old girl who is trying to be dark and mysterious and if you're just not after that it's really hard to connect with her or the book.

The book wants to talk about motherhood and choice but I think it's very poorly executed. This book is also very largely an on the road trip which was weird and wild, I think it very much wanted to bring out the wilderness and basic human/savage aspect but it's a bit trite now and it goes on for a bit too long. That along with other women who joined their merry band was just overkill. I was close to DNFing this but carried on with it as the writing was easy to get through. About 75% I found a bit more enjoyment in the book as I think it found a good balance between Calla's thoughts and thoughts on motherhood. However, in the end, it was the books attempt to be brusque so often that made this unenjoyable for me.

The author’s debut novel “Water Cure” was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. The book received mixed reviews from those who follow the prize – a lot of it in my view based around the book not matching reader’s expectations due to its marketing as a feminist dystopia as well as many readers preconceptions/biases of what a feminist dystopia should portray.

From my review of that book “like many dystopias takes an element of the observed world and extrapolates in an imagined but imaginable way. In this case, the book proceeds from toxic masculinity and takes it to a literary as well as literal conclusion ………….. unlike many other dystopias which explore .. their central idea and its implications - here [the central] idea … represents more of a starting point for a book which is light on exposition and heavy on ambiguity.

I also compared the book to “The Red Clocks” by Leni Zumas a book which as I said in my review of that book was “more about relationships between women explored within a patriarchal/misogynistic world rather than just exploring the structure of that patriarchy”.

I suspect, and can see from early reviews, that similar issues may emerge with this book – the blurb from Margaret Atwood (a year after “The Testaments” was published) along with the basic set up which gives the book its title will (and already has) given rise to certain unmet expectations.

The book is told in the first person by Calla – and we start with her around 14, awaiting her first period, a seminal (in more than one sense) moment in any girls life: when this happens they are taken by their parents (in Calla’s case, her widowed father) to a lottery station, where they draw a single ticket issued from a machine (a ticket they believe may be ordained based on your observed character and behaviour until then): a white ticket and they are given the opportunity (and expectation) to have children; a blue ticket and they are given what is seen as freedom from the burden of motherhood: fitted with an IUD, issued with a locket with a blue piece of paper inside, and sent out to make their own way to a City, away from their own family, with only a basic set of supplies.

We then join Call briefly on her years in the City (we later find hints about the dangers faced on the trip to the City – where it seems new Blue Ticket women are open season for assault; how when they arrive they are subject to a battery of tests and told which kind of jobs they are suitable for).


Calla (we realise from the occasional scenes of clarity which appear in her poetically oblique narrative style which characterises this novel) lives a life which is partly constrained and subdued but sometimes with elements of her earlier deliberately provocative/self harmful behaviour “I no longer asked men the age of my father to hit me in the face of stayed up for three days at a time … [but] Sometimes I would still go out looking for trouble”

The book then is told over a twelve month period, 18 years after her lottery, beginning with one of the regular compulsory sessions she has with her Doctor (part physician, part psychologist, part and explainer of societal norms as they apply to blue ticket women, norms enforced by uniformed emissaries).

Calla increasingly is obsessed with obtaining the very thing forbidden to her, not so much because she desires it (her practical knowledge as a blue ticket woman of pregnancy, birth, motherhood seems close to non-existent) but partly because of what she increasingly feels as the hunger and grief of her body for something natural denied to it, and partly (particularly as her Doctor sees it) because of believing an alternative to her current life will deal with her psychological issues.

The narrative then proceeds from her decision to remove her IUD, and get pregnant. When this happens, Doctor A explains that she will be visited at some stage by emissaries, given a survival kit and in a fairly deliberate echo of the first day of a Blue Ticket woman, given a small head start (the length of head start depending on her behaviour up until that point) and then hunted down (with her fate once captured not entirely clear).

This only represents the first quarter or so of the book – the remaining 75% or so is Calla’s post-conception journey.

The author’s own Twitter feed @fairfairisles serves as an excellent summary of what the book becomes

“It's kind of a road trip novel, it's kind of a pregnancy novel, it's full of old hotels, strange doctors, uncanny landscapes and longing”

And the road trip itself introduces the other key character – another pregnant fugitive Marisol, one with a clearer idea of the end-aim of the road trip and one whose interactions with Calla give the book its narrative drive, its poignancy and tenderness, its revelations, its coherence of plot and its resolution.

What we do not get, and what I think will frustrate many readers, especially those nor familiar with the author’s style, is a coherent, Margaret Atwood style, exploration of the dystopia. It would be easy to list the many seeming inconsistencies or omissions in the set up of the world that is described. On one level that would be unfair and based on a misunderstanding of how the book should be read.

But I think the book may also disappoint some of the author’s fans.

In contrast to “The Water Cure” where the inconsistency of the world view was one of the book’s strengths as it lead to the ambiguity (to the reader throughout and to the three girls at the end) of the extent to which the regime imposed on them was actually justified – here the inconsistencies seem to me to serve no purpose: at best they can be ignored and at worst they undermine the story.

I think part of this reason is that “The Water Cure” worked in its isolated island set up – where an artificial set up could be maintained.

And this set up also gave rise to other elements which made the book strong: the dark fairy tale echoes, the Shakespearean elements, the tight interactions between the three sisters, the heavy imagery of water and salt, the earth/water/sky aspects, the environmental concepts. All of those are partly echoed here but to me work less well in their societal and road trip setting.

Where the book does succeed is in retaining the author’s distinct writing style – a kind of fragmentary and elliptical way of creating impression. A style which I enjoy and which would lead me to read her next book

Reading one of Mackintosh's books is like falling into a deep, dream-filled sleep. It is like floating on a calm tide, waiting for the next wave. It is a mirror held up to the inside of our minds, the shadows we do not want to see. Her prose is poetic and hypnotising, her characters beautiful and flawed and raw. Blue Ticket is the perfect mixture of literary and dystopian, fiercely feminist fiction. Mackintosh is a true descendant of Margaret Atwood.

Mackintosh has such a great way with words - poetic, dreamlike, she leaves you to fill in the blanks and block out the backstory. Blue Ticket is an interesting look into the life of Calla, told from absolutely inside her head. Having said that, I'd love to have seen some more of the other characters, perhaps a little more from Marisol. I enjoyed Mackintosh's style, the only thing for me was perhaps the subject choice - I may have just currently hit my saturation point on mother-dystopias, but if you haven't then it's a great read.

I thought The Water Cure was great, and Blue Ticket is on the whole a solid outing - I'll always be keeping an eye out for Mackintosh's books.

As a huge fan of Sophie Mackintosh’s THE WATER CURE, a book that stayed with me so much I read it twice just to get it out of my brain (in the best way!), I was delighted to read Mackintosh’s sophomore novel.

Set in a world where young girls, upon reaching puberty, take part in a lottery to decide their future, BLUE TICKET is part literary novel, part speculative dystopia, part survival story. A white ticket means the girls will become mothers; a blue ticket means they cannot have children, so must fulfil their “destiny” in other ways.

Arguably, Mackintosh’s stories work best as literary novels, rather than as dystopia. The worlds, though curious, interesting and often frightening, are more thinly-drawn than their genre counterparts. We don’t know why the lottery has been implemented. We don’t see many other women on many other courses or making other life choices. We’ll never know why so many blue-ticket women are treated as “sluts” rather than, say, excelling as female politicians and world leaders, unencumbered by family life. Or take, for example, the fascinating rite of young girls in BLUE TICKET, who, after drawing their lottery ticket, must run to a city — any city — in an ordeal as harrowing as the thrust of the plot in dystopian YA novel THE GRACE YEAR, but which is only touched upon in tiny flashback mentions here.

Saying that, as a literary novelist Mackintosh creates atmosphere by the bucketload. For me, Mackintosh’s worlds feel somehow fleeting, temporal, elegiac. An ethereal wash of speculative fiction. The prose is beyond beautiful. As a reader, if you switch all the questions off in your mind and just ‘go with it’, there’s no doubt this novel takes you on a helluva ride. It hits its stride as the main character, Calla, heads out on the run from the authorities, pregnant and alone. Her complicated, contrary personality makes her survival intriguing — so nice to read a story where the main character is not a “Mary Sue” genius/hero/survival expert!

The intense maternal yearning of the narrative I can, personally, take or leave, and in that way it reminded me of last year’s THE FARM - another speculative dystopia about motherhood. But I liked that Calla didn’t really know why she wanted a child; she just wanted the choice.

I gulped this book down in one night, reading under the covers until long after midnight, so it’s clear to me that I’ll read anything Sophie Mackintosh writes. Ultimately, I loved it. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the early copy.