If You Were Me and Lived on...Mars

by Carole P Roman, Mateya Arkova (Illustrator)

Overview

Join Carole P. Roman when she blasts off to colonize the planet Mars, in the newest book of her informative series. Learn about how life would be living on the Red Planet. Travel to Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system. Look into the sky and watch Phobos and Deimos, Mars' two moons. Discover what you would wear, and how the seasons change. See Mars through the eyes of an adventurous youngster like you and understand what life is like on a trip of a lifetime. Don't forget to look at the other books in the series so that you can be an armchair traveler.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947118232
Publisher:	Chelshire, Inc.
Publication date:	04/19/2017
Series:	If You Were Me and Lived In...Cultural , #23
Pages:	44
Product dimensions:	8.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.11(d)
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Carole P. Roman is the award-winning author of the Captain No Beard series. Both Captain No Beard-An Imaginary Tale of a Pirate's Life and Captain No Beard and the Aurora Borealis have received the Kirkus Star of Exceptional Merit. The first book in the series was named to Kirkus Reviews Best 2012. Captain No Beard and the Aurora Borealis has been named to Kirkus Reviews Best of 2015. Each book in the series has won numerous awards including the NABE Pinnacle Award, IAN Award, Moonbeam Award 2014, National Indie Excellence Award Finalist, Shelf Media Outstanding Series Award, ForeWord Review Five Star and Finalist in the Book of the Year, and Reader's Views Children's Book of the Year 2013. Roman is also the author of the award-winning non-fiction culture series If You Were Me and Lived in... that explores customs and cultures around the world. She has co-authored a self-help book, Navigating Indieworld A Beginners Guide to Self-Publishing and Marketing. She lives on Long Island with her husband and near her children and grandchildren.

Mateya Arkova is a children's illustrator based in Bulgaria. Her illustrations take the readers in a funny cartoonish world with bright pastel colors and curvy lines leading to great adventures. Her favorite sources of inspiration are traveling the world and drawing its vivid colors.

Editorial Reviews

04/03/2017
In this addition to the If You Were Me and Lived On series, Roman lets readers imagine themselves as future Mars colonists in the year 2054. Using conditional phrasing and writing in second person, Roman balances a sense of adventure with nitty-gritty details of what readers might expect to see, do, and encounter during their time on Mars (“If you first landed on the southern hemisphere of Mars, you would be prepared for a short and extremely hot summer”). However, the tense often changes from sentence to sentence, making for convoluted reading (“Your father is a scientist who plans to help farm the red planet. He would plant seeds in a room filled with both Earth and Martian soil. Scientists have tested the soil for years”). Arkova works in a soft, smudgy style, as though the scenes are siphoned through a layer of planetary dust, though her human characters feel rough and gestural compared to her Martian landscapes. Roman includes information about Mars’s atmosphere, moons, and gravity, but the flattened delivery mutes the excitement of what ought to be an exciting foray into the unknown. Ages 4–8. (BookLife)

Publishers Weekly

2017-03-24
Roman and Arkova's (Can a Princess Be a Firefighter?, 2017, etc.) picture book imagines what life might be like for the first colonists on Mars. This science-based look at what could possibly occur in the not-too-distant future is something of a departure for the author, whose prolific output of "If You Were Me and Lived in…" books has focused on the past and present. Roman uses a similar framework here, inviting readers to put themselves in the spacesuit and boots of a 10-year-old who's traveled to the red planet as part of a three-year colonization expedition. Over the course of the story, Roman imparts Mars facts—about its terrain, its atmosphere (or lack thereof), the length of its days and years in comparison to Earth's, how the names of its two moons came to be, what humans will need to live there, and more. This easily digestible, signature mix of textbook fact and Roman's relatable, conversational style provides readers with an engaging way into the subject of space exploration, which is only deepened by a back-of-book pronunciation guide and glossary of terms. Roman might consider, however, adding a resource list to future editions for those young people who might be interested in further study on their own. The visual design of the book, while not striking, is comfortably polished, with glossy covers and clear, mostly white text incorporated into full-page illustrations. Artist Arkova, Roman's frequent collaborator, suggests the Martian landscape in watercolor-style hues of rusty reds and blues, with touches of green and yellow in the colonists' habitat. She adds a touch of whimsy with the addition of a frolicsome dog, dressed in a helmet and tail-accommodating spacesuit. A book that will expand readers' horizons with its scientific foray into the solar system.

Kirkus Reviews