MARTians
Blythe Woolston
2015, 216 pages
Fiction
In a dystopian near-future, Zoë Zindleman has just been forcibly graduated from her newly privatized high school. Zoë now has the choice of belonging (body and soul) either to AllMART or to QMART, where “your smile is [our] welcome mat.” She also needs to make a choice about where to live: either in the perpetually for-sale house that her mother has abandoned, the sinister MART dormitories, or with a group of young co-workers in an abandoned strip mall. Zoë will need all the skills she learned in high school as she tries to navigate the soulless world of consumer culture toward an uncertain future.
Woolston definitely has a gift for evoking atmosphere; it’s chillingly easy to see the world that she creates, and the sense of hopelessness is palpable. The nods to Ray Bradbury (both to Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles) are subtle but add dimension to the dystopia that Woolston has created. Zoë herself is harder to read; she has a flat narrative voice and never seems to rise above lethargy, even when her mother abandons her. The slow pace also hampers the development of the plot; the ending seems rushed, even though Zoë has been moving toward it since the beginning of the book.
Overall, this book is recommended for teens looking for something beyond the usual dystopia and adults looking for a quick read that evokes Ray Bradbury.
Nora Cascadden
Concord Public Library
For more information about the library, go to concordpubliclibrary.net. We’re also on Tumblr (reading-rumblr.tumblr.com and concordteens.tumblr.com) and Facebook (facebook.com/ConcordPublicLibrary).
