Book Review: Girlfriend on Mars, by Deborah Willis
A pothead loser watches from his couch as his girlfriend competes for a chance to be the first girl on Mars.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2023, 368 pages
A funny, poignant, and thrilling debut novel that skewers billionaire-funded space travel in a love story of interplanetary proportions.
Amber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and 23 reality TV contestants from around the world-including attractive Israeli soldier Adam, endearing fellow Canadian Pichu, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers-are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task.
Meanwhile Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of 14 years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him-and their hydroponic weed business-behind. As he tends to (and smokes) the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else. On screen, Amber competes in globe-trotting, Survivor-meets-Star Trek challenges and seems like she might be falling for Adam. But is that real, or is it just a tactic to keep from being voted off? And since the technology to come home doesn’t exist yet, would Amber really leave everything behind to be a billionaire's Martian guinea pig? Sure, the rainforest is burning, Geoff Task has bought New Zealand, and Kevin might be a little depressed, but isn’t there some hope left for life on Earth?
An audacious debut from a “a dazzlingly smart and strikingly original writer” (Molly Antopol), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amid environmental crisis and an exploration of humanity’s deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.
This story is like The Martian if a chick wrote it. In fact, that's pretty much what it is.
Yes, I said "chick." Girlfriend on Mars is as much chick-lit as it is science fiction. Unsurprisingly, I liked the sci-fi parts and did not really like the chick-lit parts.
On the surface, this is a book about a smart, feisty geek girl competing on a reality TV show for a shot at being one of the first people on Mars. But it's actually about Amber self-actualizing, digging through her past trauma, navigating female friendships and rivalries while being slut-shamed on social media, banging a hot virgin ex-Orthodox Jewish boy, and extricating herself from her multi-year dead-end relationship with her loser boyfriend.
In other words, the plot is about Going To Mars but it's executed in feelingsdumps and alternating POVs between Amber, competing against 30 other people selected from around the world, and Kevin, Amber's boyfriend who has never had any ambitions beyond growing weed in their shared Vancouver apartment and who now resolves not to leave said apartment until Amber returns home.
Kevin is a nice guy and the chapters from his POV, where he whines, pines, and angsts are supposed to humanize him, I guess, while also making it very obvious why Amber cheats on him on the regular, but I never liked him and I was not sure if the author expected us to be sympathetic to him (yeah, it's tough when your girlfriend chooses Mars over you, but let's be real, who wouldn't?) or was just giving us a mopey illustration of the quality of boyfriend that would make living on Mars preferable.
Amber is spunky and smart and girlbossy, and deep down, not very nice, which is also not something I am sure the author intended. She had a difficult childhood with her evangelical Christian parents, leaving her with tons of mommy and daddy issues (all of which, rest assured, will be dragged out and held up to the light, and cameras, over the course of the novel), and she landed with Kevin because he was nice and he was there, and she spent the next 14 years with him growing ever more resentful about how she was doing most of the work running their weed business while he just wanted to smoke weed. We get explicit sex scenes just so the author can show us that, on top of everything else, Kevin is a lousy lover, and maybe to make us more sympathetic to the fact that Amber's coping mechanism is to fuck any cute guy who smiles at her and low-key hope that this will motivate Kevin to break up with her.
Besides Amber and Kevin's dysfunctional relationship, there is some not terribly original or clever commentary about reality TV shows and social media. The contestants compete in your standard elimination challenges + audience voting reality show, very little of which demonstrates anyone's fitness to be a Marsonaut, the end goal being to narrow it down to the final two who will actually go to Mars. It's all run by a billionaire named Geoff Task who is basically an amalgam of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He is supposedly a visionary who wants to turn Mars into a new home for mankind, but it's 2023 and if you write a billionaire as anything other than a shallow villain you'll get cancelled, so of course the entire Mars Now project will inevitably turn out to be all about ego and selfishness.
Does Amber make it to Mars? Does she wind up with Kevin or the ex-IDF hunk? There is not much suspense; the ending is basically a formulaic chick-lit tearjerker that hits all the requisite buttons. Girlfriend on Mars was okay, and could have been great if the satire was sharper, but the target audience is not people who want to read about space exploration or biting social commentary, it's people who want to read about Strong Independent Women who lose their deadweight boyfriends and bang hot astronauts instead.
My complete list of book reviews.
W. W. Norton & Company, 2023, 368 pages
A funny, poignant, and thrilling debut novel that skewers billionaire-funded space travel in a love story of interplanetary proportions.
Amber Kivinen is moving to Mars. Or at least, she will be if she wins a chance to join MarsNow. She and 23 reality TV contestants from around the world-including attractive Israeli soldier Adam, endearing fellow Canadian Pichu, and an assortment of science nerds and wannabe influencers-are competing for two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars, sponsored by billionaire Geoff Task.
Meanwhile Kevin, Amber’s boyfriend of 14 years, was content going nowhere until Amber left him-and their hydroponic weed business-behind. As he tends to (and smokes) the plants growing in their absurdly overpriced Vancouver basement apartment, Kevin tunes in to find out why the love of his life is so determined to leave the planet with somebody else. On screen, Amber competes in globe-trotting, Survivor-meets-Star Trek challenges and seems like she might be falling for Adam. But is that real, or is it just a tactic to keep from being voted off? And since the technology to come home doesn’t exist yet, would Amber really leave everything behind to be a billionaire's Martian guinea pig? Sure, the rainforest is burning, Geoff Task has bought New Zealand, and Kevin might be a little depressed, but isn’t there some hope left for life on Earth?
An audacious debut from a “a dazzlingly smart and strikingly original writer” (Molly Antopol), Girlfriend on Mars is at once a satirical indictment of our pursuit of fame and wealth amid environmental crisis and an exploration of humanity’s deepest longing, greatest quest, and most enduring cliché: love.
This story is like The Martian if a chick wrote it. In fact, that's pretty much what it is.
Yes, I said "chick." Girlfriend on Mars is as much chick-lit as it is science fiction. Unsurprisingly, I liked the sci-fi parts and did not really like the chick-lit parts.
On the surface, this is a book about a smart, feisty geek girl competing on a reality TV show for a shot at being one of the first people on Mars. But it's actually about Amber self-actualizing, digging through her past trauma, navigating female friendships and rivalries while being slut-shamed on social media, banging a hot virgin ex-Orthodox Jewish boy, and extricating herself from her multi-year dead-end relationship with her loser boyfriend.
In other words, the plot is about Going To Mars but it's executed in feelingsdumps and alternating POVs between Amber, competing against 30 other people selected from around the world, and Kevin, Amber's boyfriend who has never had any ambitions beyond growing weed in their shared Vancouver apartment and who now resolves not to leave said apartment until Amber returns home.
Kevin is a nice guy and the chapters from his POV, where he whines, pines, and angsts are supposed to humanize him, I guess, while also making it very obvious why Amber cheats on him on the regular, but I never liked him and I was not sure if the author expected us to be sympathetic to him (yeah, it's tough when your girlfriend chooses Mars over you, but let's be real, who wouldn't?) or was just giving us a mopey illustration of the quality of boyfriend that would make living on Mars preferable.
Amber is spunky and smart and girlbossy, and deep down, not very nice, which is also not something I am sure the author intended. She had a difficult childhood with her evangelical Christian parents, leaving her with tons of mommy and daddy issues (all of which, rest assured, will be dragged out and held up to the light, and cameras, over the course of the novel), and she landed with Kevin because he was nice and he was there, and she spent the next 14 years with him growing ever more resentful about how she was doing most of the work running their weed business while he just wanted to smoke weed. We get explicit sex scenes just so the author can show us that, on top of everything else, Kevin is a lousy lover, and maybe to make us more sympathetic to the fact that Amber's coping mechanism is to fuck any cute guy who smiles at her and low-key hope that this will motivate Kevin to break up with her.
Besides Amber and Kevin's dysfunctional relationship, there is some not terribly original or clever commentary about reality TV shows and social media. The contestants compete in your standard elimination challenges + audience voting reality show, very little of which demonstrates anyone's fitness to be a Marsonaut, the end goal being to narrow it down to the final two who will actually go to Mars. It's all run by a billionaire named Geoff Task who is basically an amalgam of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. He is supposedly a visionary who wants to turn Mars into a new home for mankind, but it's 2023 and if you write a billionaire as anything other than a shallow villain you'll get cancelled, so of course the entire Mars Now project will inevitably turn out to be all about ego and selfishness.
Does Amber make it to Mars? Does she wind up with Kevin or the ex-IDF hunk? There is not much suspense; the ending is basically a formulaic chick-lit tearjerker that hits all the requisite buttons. Girlfriend on Mars was okay, and could have been great if the satire was sharper, but the target audience is not people who want to read about space exploration or biting social commentary, it's people who want to read about Strong Independent Women who lose their deadweight boyfriends and bang hot astronauts instead.
My complete list of book reviews.