A 2015 Alex Award Winner
Mark Watney was dead when the rest of the crew aborted their mission due to a horrible dust storm on Mars and evacuated back to their spaceship. Except he wasn't, mostly due to a lot of weird circumstances that managed to keep him alive (though, of course, his biometric scanner stopped working, so that's why his crew thought he was dead), despite the puncture in his suit caused by a piece of antenna ripped off the communications equipment by the storm. Now Mark is faced with surviving on an inhospitable planet all by himself, with nobody knowing that he's actually alive, and with little chance of him making it back home. But Mark is a botanist and a mechanical engineer, and he's surrounded by equipment designed and tested by the best minds science has to offer. As long as he can make it to the site of the next Mars mission, he might survive...
I really enjoyed this one. Despite Mark's predicament, he manages to calm down from his initial despair and start pulling a plan together that just might save him. And he does it all with a very self-deprecating sense of humor. Weir writes the first chapter or so of the book in what is essentially blog format, and it works really well in establishing him as a character. But we also get all sides of this - spoiler alert - NASA's, once they figure out he's still alive, and the rest of the crew, once they're finally told. By the end of the book, I was just like everyone else in the story, eager to see what would happen next, and if he could make it as NASA and the rest of the world pull together to bring him home. The science-y parts are possibly a little too science-y (I kind of skimmed past them a bit), but you definitely get a sense that Weir knows what he's talking about. Don't let the hard science keep you from reading this one.
(Read as part of YALSA's Hub Reading Challenge.)
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