RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewCalla herself is the pillar of the story, a compelling figure who balances thoughtfulness with ferocity, and whose growth throughout is more than earned ... This tense plot is nonetheless told with such restraint and subtlety that the one or two heavy-handed moments felt odd, as if they belonged to a different book. A few turns felt rushed, but over all the writing is clear and sharp, with piercing moments of wisdom and insight that drive toward a pitch-perfect ending ... not a book that offers easy answers. It does not explain how the world ended up this way — or even where in the world, exactly, the story takes place. This lack of concrete information is far from frustrating, but rather essential to the narrative effect: something allegorical and dreamlike, a story that doesn’t so much declare things about our outside world as reveal, intimately, Calla’s interior one. That isn’t to say there are no meaningful parallels to be drawn between the protagonist’s experience and that of being a woman in today’s world — but these are drawn not through the dystopian premise, but through the story’s thoughtful specificity ... Mackintosh successfully avoids a potential pitfall of the genre: its single-issue focus ... adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell’s 1984 or Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Those novels were like mirrors, meant to reflect us back to ourselves with horrifying clarity. Blue Ticket concerns itself more with its small cast of characters than with the world they occupy, but the novel is no less relevant or incisive for its intimacy. It is as much about the tension between independence and obligation, between desire and capability, as it is about contemporary womanhood: under constant threat just for having a body, and longing to decide your own fate.
