MARTians [Paperback]

“A gorgeous and gut-wrenchingly familiar depiction of the entropic fragmentation of society.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Last girl Zoë Zindleman, numerical ID 009-99-9999, is starting work at AllMART, where your smile is the AllMART welcome mat.” Left behind by AnnaMom, Zoë moves to the Warren, an abandoned strip-mall-turned-refuge for Zoë and a handful of other disaffected, forgotten kids. In a near-future world of exurban decay studded with big box stores, daily routine revolves around shopping (for those who can). For Zoë, the mission is simpler: live.Subtle callbacks to Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles enhance the mood of eerie devastation for those who catch the references but don't detract for those who don't. Cheery commercial scripts, news transcripts, and other ephemera of this plastic society punctuate Zoë's narration, bearing witness to her grim environment, which, heartbreakingly, has no defeatable villain. A gorgeous and gut-wrenchingly familiar depiction of the entropic fragmentation of society.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Woolston, author of the Morris Award–winning The Freak Observer (2010), does a superb job creating a world that is part Kafka and part Orwell, while the regular integration into the narrative of quotes from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles further lends an otherworldly quality. Told in Zoe’s flat, affectless first person voice—one that is beautifully articulated—the novel has an increasingly ominous tone that invites anxious speculation about the future of the three young people in a soulless world. The one is both haunting and unforgettable.
—Booklist (starred review)

Zoë’s flattened narration reflects the disjointed, disconnected nature of her existence, and while Woolston keeps the focus on Zoë, offhandedly mentioned details about her world (lãâ