Her therapist, Doctor A, soon figures out what she’s done. She takes advantage of her casual partner, R, to become pregnant without his knowledge. This “dark feeling”, as she describes it, leads her to rip out her IUD, in a particularly eye-watering scene. Her desperation manifests in small, heart-wrenching acts, such as stuffing a sock with flour so that it feels like a baby’s leg. But she also faces a damaging stigma, which she comes to feel keenly as she heads into her thirties: she fears that there is something wrong with her, that she is innately the wrong type of person to be a mother, a judgement which her free-and-easy existence seems to confirm.ĭespite this, Calla is consumed by a burning desire to have a baby. With her blue ticket, Calla has the freedom to drink, party and sleep around, and she spends her twenties making the most of this lifestyle. White-ticket girls are protected from this journey, but then essentially forced into having children (we meet one white-ticket woman who has been punished for aborting her child). Blue-ticket girls must undertake a gruelling, dangerous journey on foot to reach the city.

The narrator, Calla, lives in a world where girls – but not boys – are assigned a kind of lottery ticket on the day they hit puberty: white for a life rearing children in the countryside, blue for an IUD and a job in the city. This is the scenario Sophie Mackintosh constructs in her second novel, Blue Ticket. What if you weren’t allowed to have children? What if the choice, even the ability, to get pregnant was forcibly taken away from you at the age of fourteen? Would you feel oppressed, or relieved?

Blue Ticket by Sophie Mackintosh