monstersinspace 's review for:

Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh

1.0

emotional sad

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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I was already weary going into this book because of the whole "What if you couldn't have a baby if you wanted" has only ever happened to marginalized people and as far as white women go, no one has ever said that to them. I felt a real strong vibe of pronatalism throughout this book, and a glorification of the idea that a baby will solve everything. Also, it was a total waste for the tickets to be random when there are letteral cases of woman of color being forcefully sterilized. I think there was a miss opportunity to talk about motherhood and the actual things, such as racism and classism, that would cause people to be discouraged or prevented from having children. Instead, it was basically like this white woman parties to hard people would side eye if she was a single mother. 

On that note her going off her birth control and not telling her partners and picking someone to unknowingly be the father of her child was really gross. Then to depict him as some kind of dead beat or jerk cause he wanted nothing to do with her or the baby, yikes...

Maybe if more context had been given of what lead to the drawings, why only the girls were forced to do them, why did they have to leave home and walk to another town? I feel like the author was so reliant on weak metaphors to girl hood and patriarchy, that she never really spent any time flushing out her world.