My local bookstore’s summer reading challenge included the prompt “a YA or middle-grade book with a robot,” and I felt utterly lost. The owner—and the person who created the SFF-themed challenge—suggested A Rover’s Story by Jasmine Warga. I love space exploration as much as the next basic dude, so I queued the book on Spotify and listened my heart away for roughly six hours. The end result was a delightful and informative book for readers of all ages.
A Rover’s Story follows Resilience (Res, for short) on a multimillion-mile journey from Earth to Mars. The book begins comfortably on Earth with Resilience “waking up” and beginning to experience his surroundings as a bundle of code embedded into inactive machinery. Resilience begins to experience emotions like curiosity, fear, and affection as he observes human activity surrounding him. Res forms pseudo-bonds with Rania, one of the engineers on the rover project, and her daughter Sophie. Res can’t communicate directly with them outside the bounds of his code, and Sophie can’t talk to Res directly. Even so, Sophie writes letters to Res. He doesn’t read them directly, but they form an emotional core to give the story some extra heart. Eventually, Res is deployed to Mars, where he is joined by a drone and an orbiting satellite to serve as friends and guides. He transforms his coded mission directives into a human purpose: to be good and to help.
A Rover’s Story commits to the bit. Personifying a spacefaring robot gives youthful readers an easy way to latch onto hard scientific concepts. We learn of Res’ slow-down method and coding issues. His adventures on Mars capture the common problems a rover might actually expect on Earth’s sister planet. It’s all laced with communication to Guardian and his friendly drone, giving fresh stakes to what could otherwise be a very robotic tale, in every sense of the word.
Warga also makes the smart decision to create a fictional rover. She can implant aspects of real-life rovers and embellish details to make them work for the story. One such detail is Res’ return to Earth. That particular feat is a long way off for our current technology, but in crafting her own story informed by real rovers while not strictly tied to their factual grounding, Warga gives us a happy ending all around.
The primary human characters—Rania and her daughter Sophie—lend an extra perspective to the book. Rania’s dedication to her work on Resilience causes tension at home. Rather than see it play out firsthand, we get Sophie’s perspective in her letters to Res. She writes with a child’s optimism. Her mom is doing good work, and writing letters to the rover is Sophie’s way of staying connected to Rania. I appreciated these segments for their emotional honesty and grappling with hard concepts; working on a multibillion-dollar NASA project can’t be easy, and Warga threads the needle by balancing Rania and Sophie’s story with the more happy-go-lucky tale of Res.
A Rover’s Story blasted away nearly as fast as it arrived on my device. It’s a quick and interesting middle-grade read with an emotional heart. I’m excited for my daughter to read it when she’s old enough. Hell, maybe I’ll read it to her and do my best impression of Res’ robot voice.
Rating: A Rover’s Story – 8.0/10
