Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

Marsbound by Joe Haldeman


My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This was June's book group selection.

From Goodreads.com:  A novel of the red planet from the Hugo and Nebula Award �winning author of The Accidental Time Machine and Old Twentieth. Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime, �they'�re going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel�an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.

What started out as an interesting premise: families winning lotteries and going to Mars colony; went somewhat flat in the middle with aliens that understood Earth language culture from monitoring our radio and TV signals. Toss in a teen coming of age romance and a story told from a young woman's point of view and I kinda soured on the book. It was a bit to reminiscent of Zoe's Tale by Scalzi, even though the stories are nothing alike.


For an author who usually has a nice blend of complexity and human interest, who can weave a story that pulls me along, this one was overly simplistic and had too many implausibilities for my taste.

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Not my favorite Haldeman and I doubt I'll read the rest in the series.




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