By Declan - 12 years old

In The Martian we meet Mark Watney, an astronaut who is stuck on Mars after his team had to do an emergency abort due to an intense sandstorm and a piece of debris went right through his bio monitors, causing his team to think he was dead. This caused them to leave him. This creates the conflict of the story that he is stuck on Mars with limited resources 5 million miles away from anyone who could help him. In order to solve this he has a plan to plant potatoes using the only growable food that NASA gave them. He had to do this by bringing in Martian soil and putting Earth soil on top to give it bacteria. He then has to create water using rocket fuel and pure oxygen to give the soil enough water. After all of that the Hab (his base) rips open so he has to change plans and modify his rovers. This allows them to carry al

l his life support while driving each day and keeping him warm. He then goes on a fifty day journey across Mars to reach where the next Mars mission is going to be. He then has to redesign their rocket to take him up out of orbit where he is able to reach his team's ship. However they are only flying by and have to get it perfectly right to catch him. In the end they are able to pull him in and get him safely aboard their ship. 

In the book the most used settings are Mark’s base on Mars known as the Hab and his makeshift rover that he uses to find pathfinder and the base for the next Mars mission. The Hab is a big building with canvas on top that balloons above them. Mark spends most of his time there and is where he grows potatoes at the start of the book. It is also his living area and where he performs all of his thinking and planning for how to not die on Mars. The other most used setting is in his rover. He uses that to travel to get things like Pathfinder (which he uses to talk to Earth) and eventually the base for the next mission. It is a rover hauling along another rover. The first one has all of his life support systems and a decaying radioactive isotope that he is able to use as heat as well as a room made of the Habs Canvas that he uses as his bedroom. The rover has solar panels stacked on top of it that he uses to charge every five days. The other rover is similar except it gets all of it’s air from a tube connected to the other rover and Mark puts everything that won’t get damaged from the Martian air as well as all of his food. 

The character I kind of have to choose is Mark because he was the only one in it really. At the start of the book he was thinking that he wasn’t that important because he was the seventeenth person to visit Mars and the lowest rank on his team. He also is just a botanist so at the start he feels not important like no one will really care about him. However by the end he had to do so much hard stuff and overcome so many challenges that should have probably killed him. For example he stayed on Mars for over five hundred sols and was able to grow plants there meaning he officially colonized it. Overall this led to him having a change in self esteem and realizing that he did some cool stuff and survived against all odds.

I can relate to this book because it is about overcoming challenges. While Mark’s challenges are surviving on another planet and mine are a lot simpler it still shows that you should always move forward and keep going until you reach your goal. For example when Mark Watney’s rover flips over he doesn’t just give up; instead he keeps going. So I can relate to this by not giving up when I face challenges and working to finish what I set out to do. Despite the fact that the environment and challenges may be different it can still teach me to never give up.

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