Blue Ticket

April 27, 2020
Mackintosh’s haunting, dystopian tale (after The Water Cure) explores the emotional fallout of forced birth control in a near-future society. Once girls begin to menstruate, they go to a lottery clinic and draw a ticket. White means they must bear children; blue means they must use birth control. Calla draws a blue ticket at age 14, and as she becomes a woman, she happily explores her untethered sexual freedom. When she reaches her 30s, she begins wanting a child. Despite her fears that the blue ticket means she is unsuited for motherhood (“Failure to nurture,” she imagines a doctor writing on her chart), Calla nevertheless manages to remove her birth control device and becomes pregnant. After her doctor says she must have an abortion, she goes on the run. Calla meets fellow rebel Marisol, and the two women become lovers while holed up in a deserted cabin, determined to give birth before they’re caught by the authorities. Mackintosh serves up vivid details of Calla’s psychological ordeal in the language of body horror (“I was the chicken I opened up one day only to discover that the stomach had been left in by mistake”), and convincingly conveys Calla’s and Marisol’s desperation. This tense, visionary drama is a notable addition to the growing body of patriarchal dystopias.

Starred review from May 15, 2020
A young woman undermines the state-controlled system that determines motherhood to near-disastrous effect in this chilling follow-up to The Water Cure. In early puberty, Calla's father takes her to a lottery station, where she chooses a blue ticket from a mysterious machine. Once her fate is determined, Calla must make her way to a city, alone and on foot. If she manages to avoid the roving packs of boys and men who prowl the woods and roadways, Calla will start her adult life as a "blue ticket." In the city, Calla is outfitted with a copper IUD and expected to contribute to society solely through her position as a chemist in a laboratory. "Blue ticket: I was not motherly," Calla thinks. "It had been judged that it wasn't for me by someone who knew better than I did." Her days are filled with work and visits to the combative Doctor A, who monitors blue tickets like Calla. Her evenings are filled with drinking and casual sex. Soon, however, Calla can't resist the pull of the "new and dark feeling" inside her, a "strange, ravaging ghost." Coveting the forbidden lives of the few women who bear white tickets, she removes the IUD on her own using tweezers and enough booze to numb the blinding pain. When Doctor A discovers Calla's inevitable pregnancy, she's cast out of her house and once again left to fend for herself. Mackintosh renders Calla's internal struggle with deft, lyric precision. What is it about Calla the state determined unmotherly? How will she care for a child without the protection of a family or community? Can she trust the other women she meets on the road, who have also decided to take their fates into their own hands? Like Sarah Hall in Daughters of the North or Leni Zumas in Red Clocks, Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel. Late in the book, Mackintosh reveals that Calla, like other women in her country, has little to no medical knowledge about her own body, especially when it comes to pregnancy and childbirth. They're shocked to learn about the placenta, for example, and have no instinct for how to hold a baby. This detail transforms Calla's haunting quest to become a mother into a heartbreaking bid for self-determination, self-worth, and self-knowledge--no matter the cost. A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage.

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Starred review from May 1, 2020
When her first period starts, Calla is sent away to undergo ritual preparation for womanhood. One step is to pull a ticket that will decide her fate. A white ticket ensures marriage and motherhood, and a blue ticket sends her to a career. To ensure childlessness, Calla and the other blue tickets are implanted with IUDs and summarily abandoned to their own devices. Those who survive the migration to a city eventually finish educations and find jobs. Most lead libertine lives with endless nights of drinking and casual sex. Comes a time, however, when Calla can no longer deny a deep yearning for a child. She wrests the IUD from her body, uses her current boyfriend to impregnate her, and sets off on a journey similar to her adolescence with its dangers and uncertainty. But Calla is certain of one thing: she wants this baby, and she is surprised to cross paths with others like her who have left their unmoored lives to answer a primal biological call. In her thought-provoking novel about fate, control, and biology, Mackintosh (The Water Cure, 2019) keeps the reader turning pages as Calla's due date approaches. A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)