Zoe Zindleman, ID No. 009-99-9999, is the last girl. The last girl to graduate when her high school unexpectedly closes by gubernatorial decree. The last girl living on her all-but-abandoned cul-de-sac.
Zoe has always carefully counted down the days until she would graduate and move on to a career path, but she would never have guessed that she'd be seeing the governor's face on a screen at the front of her classroom informing students their school is closing, effective immediately. Her adult life is about to start - a full year and a half early.
It's not like there are too many options for workers in the world of MARTians. Nearly everyone winds up working at one of the massive mega-box stores that dominate the country. Zoe is a clever, diligent girl, mathematically gifted and academically inclined. She's always earned excellent grades. In a different time and place, Zoe would be college-bound and free to pursue her dreams. Zoe's reality, unfortunately, is not so expansive. The only post-secondary education available is online via the for-profit Unicorn University ("Go Uni-Uni!"). Zoe is not interested in matriculating from Uni-Uni. She is, however, handed e-invitations to apply from two of the most prevalent box stores, AllMart and Q-MART - a success by anyone's standards. Working for one of these two stores means a job for life.
When Zoe comes home to her mostly empty suburb, she discovers her mother, also a box-store worker, has been transferred to another town, and Zoe is to be left by herself as she begins her new career. Zoe winds up taking the job at AllMART ("Where your smile is AllMART's welcome mat!"), but her living situation has become precarious. She's now accepted that her family's house will never sell, so Zoe's options are to either live there as long as she can before the house is foreclosed, like every other house in their subdivision, or to move into an abandoned strip mall that happens to be AllMART-adjacent and peopled with a motley crew of fellow AllMART workers.
While this book fits squarely into the "dystopian" category, it feels and reads nothing like standard dystopian fare. Zoe is not a hero; she's not out to take down the government. She's a smart girl living in a culture that offers zero opportunity for independent thought or creativity. The world created by author Blythe Woolston is bleak and surreal, but also darkly humorous. Zoe's narrative is enhanced by adverts, jingles and catch phrases that hilariously underscore the skewed nature of a society controlled by corporate interests.
"MARTians" is not a plot-driven book, so readers looking for a high-octane page-turner might wish to look elsewhere. But for those who appreciate a bit more subtlety, they'll find that both Zoe's character development and the depiction of this chilling near-future are brilliant. Woolston's economical prose creates a satirically incisive and thought-provoking novel.