Polly Newton and her brother, Charles, are the titular Martians. They're being packed off to an elite boarding school on earth, so that they can glad-hand with politicians children and influential industrialists grandsons, and generally get themselves prepared for a life of visibility and influence themselves. Their mother is, after all, part of the social elite on Mars. Unfortunately for Polly and Charles, the Martians are rather more egalitarian than those Earthside - they don't see themselves as special -and the folks down on Earth thing that the Martians and the rest of the riff-raff from off-planet are about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from Smallpox, and about as welcome an addition to the school campus.
We ride along in Polly's head, and she's...I want to say likeable, but relatable is probably something more like it. Her story plays out in a conversationalist style, from one viewpoint. But she's definitely a teenager being taken from everything she knows and everything she wants, and being dumped into a deep pool without much warning. Cue culture shock, whinging, complaints ad nauseam (justified and otherwise). It can be a little exhausting, looked at from the outside. But Polly is also smart and funny and sometimes brave. If she isn't super-special per se, she's competent and willing to make decisions, commit to them and then ride out the consequences. If I occasionally wanted to roll my eyes at the theatricality of her antics, I also went along for the ride happily enough when she pushed back on prejudice, and on the need to be better expressed through owning things. Polly has an honesty to her that makers her work as a protagonist, a willingness to just be herself which probably sits well with the intended audience (it is a YA book after all).
Having said that, Vaughn expertly draws a world that's living in a post-climate-crisis interplanetary era. We still have the same elites and the same prejudices, with different targets, different names, different faces. But there's a sense of the world having opened up just a little, onto the wider stage. The school and its routine and occasional casual brutality seem very well realised, as does Polly's sense of isolation from her classmates, her and the others from off-earth, as they try to work with different dietary and gravitational needs, with not much by way of accommodations. There's also some points trekking around on Earth that feel melancholic, feel genuine, and those were a pleasure; there was a particular piece in a museum that stuck with me thereafter.
Sadly for Polly, and Charles, and, well, everyone else, something odd is going on at their new school for the terminally rich and posh. Accidents are happening a little too often. Things are going a bit wrong. Issues are escalating. And nobody is really talking about why. This mystery threads its way through the book, and if the denouement wasn't entirely satisfying, it did deliver in terms of tension and catharsis. The story itself is paced well up to that point, slowly giving us more and more of an insight into what's going on and why, the who the what the why the where and the how. That said, the close feels a little abrupt, and like there's more to come, more to be said - perhaps in a sequel.
Overall, this is a fun short read, and one I rather enjoyed; I hope you do the same!
