This was page turning and fascinating, I devoured it in a day and loved the style, the prose and the concept. A long hard look at womanhood, motherhood and humanity, it has things to say, but with a corking plot to match.

I was really excited about this book and I knew I wanted to read it as soon as I heard about it.

Much like when reading ‘The Water Cure’ I easily found myself immersed in the world that Sophie Mackintosh creates. I love that you never really know where it’s set or what year it is.
However, another part of me is dying for more information. Specially regarding the lottery and the blue and white tickets.

I’ve read other books regarding the issue of fertility and women’s reproductive rights but found this to be better and more interesting than the others I’ve read.

A meditation on freedom of choice and motherhood

When a girl menstruates for the first time, she must go to the station to take a lottery ticket. White means her life will be as a wife and mother, Blue means work and childlessness. Calla’s ticket is blue. Initially, she throws herself into the life she has been given, fuelled by alcohol and engaging in indiscriminate sex. Over time, she senses a dark cloud gnawing away at her: the absence of motherhood.

Mackintosh is a master at withholding information. Her reticence at filling in extraneous detail works well here. We know as little about the world of the story as Calla does of pregnancy and childbirth.

Oddly, once the protagonist takes action, she goes into a loop of self-destructive behaviour which slows the forward momentum of the middle section.

Intense and haunting.

My thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Books (UK). for the ARC

There’s no way this won’t get repeatedly compared to The Handmaid’s Tale, being a dystopian novel about a woman’s lack of choice around motherhood, but that shouldn’t detract from how good this is. Little information is given about the regime that the protagonist, Calla, is desperate to escape, meaning that her world seems disconcertingly like our own, with just a few small and terrifying differences. I really liked this aspect, as I often find the overt world-building that goes into traditional dystopian or fantasy novels to be too much to follow; I much prefer this more speculative world.

Told in the first person, Sophie Mackintosh's "Blue Ticket" is a dystopian tale which centres around issues of fertility and child-bearing in a patriarchal society where free will is eradicated. It's chilling and raises questions about the innate nature of desire and womanhood. By the end, I felt like the book had left a hole in my heart.

Sophie Mackintosh writes a world in which the madonnas and the whores are split irrevocably. Both tribes are issued tickets deciding their fates immediately following their first periods, and carry them for life in lockers around their necks. The former have white tickets and possess all the purity of motherhood; the latter have blue tickets and are forcibly implanted with an IUD, then granted all the hedonistic wildness of a childless life. The protagonist Calla is a blue ticket who, finding herself overcome by the urge to have a baby, cuts out her IUD, then becomes a pariah hunted by agents of the state as she flees pregnant towards the border. This book illuminates the darkness and violence of motherhood - the jealousy and raw desire to possess (I thought of King Solomon, the two women, and the baby), the self-annihilation of maternal sacrifice, the dark fears, the deep tribalism between those who are mothers and those who choose to reject it. The society portrayed is a dystopia but not one that seems particularly menacing or ill-intentioned - it is merely a place where rationality rules, and the battle Calla wages against it is one of biological wanting. I thought afterwards of the arguments circling this (motherhood vs childlessness, birth control/sterilisation vs over-population, the biological desire to pro-create vs environmental obligations) and the crux of all these arguments powerfully explored here - primal desire vs rationality.

The thing is, bookshops are over-packed with 'feminist dystopias' obsessing about babies and motherhood. Yes, reproductive rights remain a contested issue but Atwood nailed the topic and this feels like one of many, many also rans. I loved the twisted fairy tale aura of The Water Cure but this feels unoriginal in comparison. It's hard to buy into the simplistic premise that has minimal world-building to convince and the writing is merely workmanlike. Overall, this lacks conviction and energy: disappointingly flabby with little tension or drive.