Surviving the Wrath of the Red Planet

By: Aiden D.

Entertainment Weekly said " this book is riveting… Cast Away meets Apollo 13." They described The Martian absolutely perfectly. It was so much fun to read and was really exciting. Andy Weir wrote this book to show the challenges of a man who had been stuck on Mars and what he was forced to do with no one else by his side. It was suspenseful and overall, a terrific book.

This book was about a man who had been abandoned in Mars after a dust storm had forced him to fly away and his crew had thought that he was dead which is why they had abandoned him back on Mars. When the storm had passed astronaut Mark Watney was required to survive without his crew members by his side. He had to try to survive for as long as he could with the portions of food that was left on Mars by his crew members. Mark Watney was unable to contact his crew members and could not contact anyone on Earth. Could he eventually get off of this barren planet or was he stuck there for the rest of his life?

I really enjoyed this book and it was a lot of fun to read. It was really interesting to see how he got over some of the problems that he had face while he was stuck on Mars. The things that worked for me in this book is the amount of suspenseful things that happened really made me keep reading this book and could hardly allow me to keep the book down. One thing that I did not enjoy however was that in some parts of the book it was slow and the book dragged a little. Some of the things in this book were realistic to an extent but the parts that were unrealistic were really interesting and contributed to making this story amazing.

I would totally recommend this book to all people in middle school high school. The reason I would recommend this to that age group is because there are some words that are used which would be inappropriate to younger readers and it would not be good for them. This book is so intense and as writer Ernest Cline said this book is "relentlessly entertaining and inventing". This book is great for students.