Probably the best book I've read so far this year, and one I've been pressing into people's hands at any opportunity ever since. Maybe even better than The Water Cure. Highlighted in my list of the best novels of the summer on Five Books: https://fivebooks.com/best-books/notable-novels-summer-2020-cal-flyn/
I'll also be reviewing it for the New Humanist magazine.

There are not enough words to describe how much I enjoyed this radical new feminist novel by Sophie Mackintosh. It was on one level so surreal with a whole new societal premise, yet it is written in a way that all these unusual trends, events, life- styles are so obvious and accepted, that the reader should not blink an eye at them. So although there are strange customs, they are presented as norms with which the reader is completely familiar and accepting.
Calla, the main protagonist does not accept the life which has been mapped out for her, and conspires to chose her own (forbidden path).
The people she encounters and travels with, in her metaphorical and physical journey, add depth and normalcy as she manoeuvres this strange Society, where your life is mapped from the day of your first menstrual period.
I will say no more. For fans of ‘Brave New World’ ‘1984’ and They Handmaid’s Tale’ this is a whopper of a story which I devoured in less than a day. It was brilliant and haunting at the same time. This was my first experience reading. the work of Sophie Mackintosh, but it will not be my last. Huge congratulations to Sophie Mackintosh 👏👏👏👏👏

This was quite reminiscent of other novels that I have read such a A Handmaid's Tale, I found it quite slow to get into the story it didn't grab me straight away and I didn't really click with the writing. I think that it's a really popular genre and other readers may really enjoy but not for me. Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to read it.

In a literary world where The Handmaid's Tale reigns supreme, Sophie Mackintosh has taken on this mammoth genre with aplomb. This novel is literary, intricate and surprising, its narrative constantly twisting under the long shadow of Atwood's Gilead. As a reader, once you know the ticket system, you're set. Mackintosh does not really need to get into the nitty gritty of the circumstances of this world or the consequences of breaking the rules, which frees her up to write in a very descriptive and lyrical way. I was somewhat surprised at the ending, but, as with her first novel, felt that she tied up the loose ends in the best possible way.

Calla lives in a society where the right to bear children is something determined by the colour of the ticket that you pull on the day you start to menstruate. Calla's ticket is blue, which means she is sent to the city to live a life without children. Working in a lab and taking regular visits with her doctor, she becomes listless in her life and decides a different path might be the right one for her.

I really loved the premise of Blue Ticket. It had vibes of The Handmaid's Tale and other similar dystopian fiction titles which I've previously enjoyed.

Calla's narrative was quite difficult to settle into and reminded me of Esther in The Bell Jar slightly as it felt rather detached.

I started to enjoy the book a lot more after Calla left the city and other interesting characters were introduced. The threat of danger and capture also really helped.

Sophie Mackintosh has created a really interesting world, though I couldn't be sure what the purpose of such a system was for. Population control? The repression of women?

I enjoyed Blue Ticket overall and look forward to reading more of the author's work.

This was a beautiful drama that I had a great time reading. The book was very well written and the characters were believable. Highly recommended!

When girls start to menstruate, they are made to take a ticket: blue means they focus on their career, white means family. It's a lottery that shapes their lives. But what if they want more? Following Calla, who longs for a child, as she pushes beyond the confines of a blue ticket life, it's an intimate, dark and bleak exploration of the weight of "wanting it all" in a dystopian world that explicitly denies it. Riveting and sorrowful.

A good but frustrating read, I don't think this one worked for me. I loved the premise and found the book interesting. It was slow paced and I didn't feel any connection to Calla. A strong three stars but not one I'd be in a hurry to recommend.

World of blue and white tickets. World with or without children. Women as whores or virgins. Calla, a blue ticket rebel, reaches the age of 30 and she wants to have a child. So she breaks the one rule knowing the consequences. She is on the run, pregnant and in fear. She realises she is not alone and hence questions the system. Does lottery really predicts her life?

Very well written, in kind of raw form.

I read Sophie Mackintosh's novel The Water Cure and enjoyed her writing a lot. It's quite a literary style and the story was other-worldly in a dreamy sense. This book is a little more down to earth but the writing is just as captivating. The story is set in a near future dystopian world where girls are sorted at the menarche and have to leave their homes to find their own way. It's a brutal time for them but strangely well organised and has opportunities for these girls. Calla, the main character, finds herself in a personal crisis and is forced to flee. We read of this journey and also the journey she took to find herself in that place as well. It a very compelling story and is beautifully written. I recommend it highly.

I’m not completely sure why but I just couldn’t get on with this book. I loved the subject matter and was really excited about reading it. That I think is the main strength of the book. Such a relevant and important topic. However the way it was written that I struggled to even finish the proof.

"In a world where women can't have it all, don't underestimate the relief of a decision being taken away from you"

Sophie Mckintosh's feminist dystopian tale has a setting that is sorting hat in Gilead. Every woman enters a lottery on her first period where she is assigned either a blue or white ticket. White ticket means you get a family and blue ticket means you get your complete freedom but you can't have a child.

Calla, a blue ticket rebel, reaches the age of 30 and she gets the 'dark feeling' to have a child. So she breaks the one rule knowing the consequences and the book traces the consequences of the choice. She is on the run, pregnant and in fear, as she battles off the emissaries and the common wolves after her. She realises she is not alone and hence questions the system.

She is joined by other desperate women on the run including a rebel white ticket who doesn't want a baby. All the while she is battling questions of what it means to be a mother and how the lottery can predict if you are worthy. When she gets drunk or smokes while on the run, she tends to doubt if the lottery was right after all. It is not a fight against the system, but against their own choices and decisions. And how the maternal instincts for protecting the baby helps them survive.

The writing is raw and hard hitting. So much so that while reading some parts, I had to pause since I started feeling uncomfortable (and chose to read about the horrors of the concentration camp instead). The evocative prose is bold and undiluted. Pregnancy, cravings, child birth - in it's entire raw form. And it is a thriller.

The book is not without flaws, but I think this will win a few accolades along the way.

Note: Thanks to Penguin books UK and Netgalley for providing the ARC of this book for review. The book releases on 27 Aug.

It took me a little whiloe to settle into this story but I would recommend that anyone reading it does stick with it. The story becomes more and more involved and addictive. You have to read on to the end to discover what happens to the main character. It's a bizarre story line - but an interesting concept.

I feel like I can't stop reading dystopian literature at the moment! Sophie Mackintosh puts a spin on a new America where upon reaching puberty, every woman is assigned a 'ticket' in the so called lottery. If they receive a white ticket they will allowed to be mothers; if they receive a blue ticket they will be placed on birth control and face a childless future. Blue Ticket is the story of one woman deciding she wants to choose, rather than blindly accept a preconceived fate given to her by an invisible hand. However, 'blue ticket' women are not allowed to get pregnant or have children. This is the way the world works. To stay pregnant and keep her maybe she must go on the run...

I did enjoy the central themes of this novel, although they were basic - the ticket system is based upon a reductive categorisation of women either as mothers or as pleasure-seeking sex addicts. The virgin or the whore. The discussions the women have in the novel with each other (and the internal battle the narrator has with herself) are all about choice, free will, and the difficulty of trying to decide whether we want what we want, or whether we want what we are told to want. It's a clever way to make people with opposing views question each other and we are shown the positives and negatives of being with child, and being childless. At times with the narrator on the run I was reminded of The Handmaids's Tale. Until women in the real world in 2020 are allowed to be whatever they want and without judgment, we will continue to see stories such as Mackintosh writes.

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.