Review: MARTians by Blythe Woolston

MARTians by Blythe Woolston

Publisher: Candlewick Press

Release Date: October 13th 2015

My Rating: ★★★

Goodreads

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Last girl Zoë Zindleman, numerical ID 009-99-9999, has just been graduated. Early. Her options: wait for her home to be foreclosed and stripped of anything valuable now that AnnaMom has moved away, or move to the Warren, an abandoned strip-mall-turned-refuge for other left-behinds—a safe place, and close to AllMART, Zoë’s new employer, where “your smile is AllMART’s welcome mat.” Zoë may be the last girl, but her name means “life,” and Zoë isn’t ready to disappear into the AllMART abyss. Zoë wants to live.

               MARTians is set in a world of exurban decay studded with big-box stores, where its inhabitants are numbed by shopping and the six o’clock “news.” MARTians may be the future, but it is frighteningly familiar.

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What I learned from this book: One day Walmart and K-Mart are going to rule our lives and it’s totally going to SUCK.  (Okay, so you changed the names to AllMART and Q-Mart, but I see you, Blythe Woolston, I see you.)  When I first picked up this book I hadn’t exactly bothered to learn what it was about.  I, naturally, assumed it was about aliens from mars plus shopping carts.  But no, there are no aliens here, just really creepy big-box store employees.

The book begins with the main character, Zoë, and her inner monologue, which I loved right away.  She’s smart, quirky, sarcastic, but also has this air of innocence that made me want to bundle her up and keep her safe forever.  Which might have been for the better, because a lot of messed up crap starts happening almost right away.

One minute Zoë is in class waiting for the lesson, then the next she finds out her school is being closed due to budget cuts and she’s graduated.  This happens on page four, so prepare to be slapped in the face with “what the heck?” moments for the entire rest of the book.

Namely when her mother, AnnaMom, LEAVES with a crappy explanation, and then proceeds to NEVER CONTACT HER ONLY DAUGHTER EVER AGAIN!  As you can probably tell, this bothered me a little.  (I’m lying, it bothered me a lot.)  I’ve had a few days to digest this book and I just cannot come to terms with this.  She says she’s leaving because they can’t sell the house.  Okay AnnaMom, that’s fine, but for God’s sake, take your fifteen-year-old daughter with you!  Geez.  So AnnaMom leaves and Zoë is weirdly okay with this.  I mean, she’s sad, but a weird resigned sort of sad.  I kept waiting for the scene where Zoë finally breaks down (and I start crying with her), but that scene never comes.

With AnnaMom gone, who does Zoë turn to for help? Why, a strange boy she’s never met before, who happens to own a truck and gives Zoë a ride home from her first interview, of course!  Okay, in her defense she doesn’t actively seek out his help.  No, the boy, Timmer, just offers his help and then refuses to leave.  Wait, that sounds worse.  She accepts his help after he asks to use her shower and they eat takeout together… Still worse.

Suffice it to say, Timmer is not a kidnapper/rapist, so it’s all good!  She ends up living with Timmer and his weird mishmash “family” in an old abandoned strip mall called The Warren…because it’s closer to where she works.  Alright Zoë, we’ll go with that.

So Zoë gets a job at Walma—I mean AllMART, where all the name badges must be unique and she is promptly rechristened “Zero.”  She learns to “never badger the badger” as one of her classmate, Bella, now “Belly,” complains about her nametag and then disappears a few weeks later.  It’s after Zoë begins working at AllMART for a few weeks that her clever inner monologue begins to wear down.  She becomes tired and begins to assimilate into the “AllMART way.”

At this point in the book there are several mini plotlines that start to pop up. The problem is that none of these plotlines go anywhere.  Like, at all.  It’s almost as if the author got these ideas in her head, added them, then completely forgot about them and moved on.  One in particular really stood out for me.  There’s a scene where it’s implied that Zoë is attracted to a girl who is also staying at The Warren, and then she vaguely talks about an “awakening” in herself, but then it’s completely dropped and never mentioned again.  The whole thing feels awkward and out of place, especially considering there is exactly zero romance anywhere else in the book.

The entire story is very much centered around Zoë, which is fine, but it was so much so about Zoë that none of the other characters ever have any sort of character development.  When she first meets them they’re portrayed a certain way, and that’s the way they stay.  I so wanted to love all of them.  I wanted to dump my affections on them, as any good fan-girl would.  But they’re so one-dimensional; instead I’m relegated to “liking” and seemingly held at an arm’s length by the writer.   Timmer, 5er, Luck, Pineapple, and Juliette.  Timmer is the leader, Juliette is the pretty one, Luck and Pineapple are the funny ones, and poor 5er is an emotionally scarred kid.  And that’s basically all there is to them.

On a final note, I did have a problem with the information given about the world in the book.   It felt choppy and underdeveloped.   Different aspects of how life works in this world are constantly alluded to, but you never get the whole picture.  Which is so sad, at least for me, because I was fascinated by this world.  I wanted to know everything about it.  Instead I’m offered little tasters.  It was sort of like getting one of those samples from Costco.  Like the creampuffs.  They can’t ever give you a whole creampuff.  No, they give you a half.  But the information I got wasn’t even like half a creampuff’s worth.  It was like…a sixth of a creampuff.

Final verdict: MARTians was a fun read.  It moves along quickly and is entertaining for the couple hours it takes to read, but at the expense of a richer world and characters.  I don’t regret reading it, but I probably wouldn’t read it again.