Reviews

Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh

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mellove's review against another edition

adventurous challenging slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

I was expecting something entirely different, but it does make you think about the rights that women have and don’t have and the feelings and the unknown of motherhood

merelybone's review against another edition

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2.0

when girls come of age in this dystopian society, they are awarded a lottery ticket. white grants them marriage and children, blue grants them freedom. choice is a luxury none can afford.

though this novel is hailed as a subversive feminist exploration of choice similar to the handmaid’s tale, in reality it does very little to challenge the status quo. throughout the novel it’s heavily implied and even outright said that blue ticket women are careless, hedonistic, and ultimately unfulfilled by the freedom they’ve been granted while white ticket women are ‘like a witch’ and ‘unyielding and ungrateful, to be chosen in that way and not to understand it, not to value it’ in their desire to obtain the same autonomy blue ticket holders have been awarded purely by chance. there is resentment on both sides, each possessing something the other covets, but the blue ticket woman’s resentment toward the white ticket woman is justified while hers is rooted in fallacy. this is not unlike the real world where childfree women are often regarded as foolish and chastised by women struggling with infertility for ‘taking for granted’ and ‘wasting’ their fertility while these women are left wanting for something they ultimately cannot have.

though choice is the overarching theme, as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear even in its absence that one life path is considered more valuable than the other. fathers are often showered with gifts and praise when pushing their prams through public spaces while blue ticket women are routinely objectified and regarded as deficient and complacent, doing little more with their lives than sleeping around and consuming alcohol. it’s heavily implied through the presence of emissaries whose purpose is to remind them that their lifestyle is superior so they are less tempted to stray from their path, that motherhood is every blue ticket holder’s secret desire that must be kept in check, and why wouldn’t it be when we’re still operating under the assumption that all women inherently desire to become mothers?

i really hoped this novel would do more to decenter motherhood as the pinnacle of woman’s existence and put to rest the tired myth that women are only destined to reproduce lest they be regarded as defunct, but sadly it fell short of my expectations. writing it from the perspective of a white ticket woman trying to escape her fate would have been more radical and would have done more to challenge this trope, but despite the way the premise is presented, i’m under the impression that was never the author’s intention in writing this book. though it tried not to be, it was heavily biased in favor of the current patriarchal agenda with sprinkles of internalized misogyny throughout. despite frequent and candid criticism of the negative and often irreversible effects it has on a woman’s wellbeing (which i appreciated greatly because how often are women actually told the truth about these kinds of things), as another reviewer said, the novel felt like an exaltation of pregnancy and motherhood over all other life paths, and that, in my opinion as a white ticket holder who would have preferred blue, is the very antithesis of choice.