A Rover's Story

“Avoid dust, see stars.”

A middle-grade novel about a Mars rover, Resilience, loosely based on the Perseverance rover. Res is highly anthropomorphized, has an adorable drone buddy named Fly, and is very attached to his “hazmat” humans back at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. He reminded me a lot of WALL-E, in the way he reacted and thought about things, though you get to see the entire story through Res' point of view.

Even though this is for children, I did appreciate getting a broad strokes timeline in how long it takes rovers to launch, traverse over another planet's terrain, etc. Res talks about it taking months to rove from the place they landed on the red planet to another, offline rover they want to try to bring back online, and about years passing from the start of the mission until it eventually concludes and he is brought back to earth. (Some of this is also explored through letters that scientist Rania's daughter writes – addressed to Res – as she gets to experience the launch in the sixth grade, and the things she experiences as she grows up, goes to high school and then college, experiences highs and lows while he remains on Mars.)

I am not exactly science-minded, but I am feelings-minded, and for a book about essentially a robot, it managed to get me in the feels. It was very good.

Clever premise but I am not in the mood to read this right now. Rating based on the first 50 pages and the thoroughness of the author's note.

This was so sweet and totally made me cry. Warga does such a good job with Res' “humanity” that you will have to stop and remind yourself every so often that rovers don't actually have feelings. (Or so we think.)