Girlfriend on Mars

"Girlfriend on Mars" is a gimlet-eyed chronicle of Millennial angst and frustration set in the near future.

Kevin is perpetually stoned, yet perceptive to the point of paralysis. Amber, his girlfriend, is determined to win celebrity at any cost, even the cost of her own principles. Both are emotionally crippled by dysfunctional parents.

Author Willis uses black humor and shifting narratives to render a bleak and gruesome conjunction of reality TV, social media, and the billionaire space race. The effect of this conjunction on one young couple struggling for survival is predictably bleak.

Despair is normal in a world in which the only currency a normal person has is personal privacy, if not your very soul. The sole ray of hope is in friendships and nature.

Reminiscent of Sally Rooney's "Normal People," T. C. Boyle's "The Terranauts" and Dan Chaon's "Sleep Walk."

This book was hard to put down, and it took me some time to decide what to say in a review. It’s funny and depressing and satirical and sad...yet hopeful. It touches on Internet celebrity, how our upbringings make us who we are, and how to try and save the planet. You know, the small stuff. It’s Sci-fi because of the whole Mars plot, but it’s also refreshingly character-driven.

Amber and Kevin have been together since their late teens and have settled into a somewhat co-dependent but warm relationship across the country in Vancouver. Amber decides to apply and gets a spot on a reality show that eliminates two people each week, with the final two heading to Mars to help colonize the planet. It's sponsored by MarsNow, a company run by a tech-bro-douchebag, as Kevin would call him.

The characters are so well-written and so flawed in authentic ways. I will for sure check out the next thing Deborah Willis writes. Thank you so much to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Girlfriend on Mars is a fun read, great for a vacation book. I raced through it eager to see the outcome, the characters were all pretty unlikable but was still interested in their story.
A book I will be recommending as a summer read!

Kevin and Amber have been together for fourteen years. They share their Vancouver apartment with their hydroponically-grown cannabis "babies" and have a profitable business selling weed. Life is going smoothly, or so Kevin thinks, until Amber tells him that she's been selected as a contestant on a reality show that will send the two winners to Mars. Permanently. And she really wants to win. Despondent, Kevin flips to the show every week to watch his girlfriend compete for a spot while falling in love with someone else. But what can he do? Is there a way to win her back? And why does she want to leave so badly in the first place?

This is one of those books you’re either going to connect with or not — at first I wasn’t sure which way it would go for me, but I did end up invested in the story. I can't say I really even liked Amber or Kevin, but I definitely was interested to find out how their stories would end.

Told in two POVs, we get to see Amber's perspective on the MarsNow competition and her relationships with its contestants, as well as Kevin's pathetic little life back home in Vancouver, trying to hold it together. They're both pretty terrible people, and if you can't stand cheating, they're not people you're going to like. They cross relationship boundaries so casually that it's grating, but I think this serves to illustrate how neither of them really should be in that relationship anymore.

Overall I found this book to be such an interesting concept and told extremely well (especially for a debut!) and I'm curious to see what Deborah Willis comes up with next. Check this one out if you like quirky character-driven novels, especially ones full of characters you don't have any particular affinity for. It's kind of like playing the Sims — you don't really care about them but it's fascinating to see what they do in weird situations.

Thank you to Deborah Willis, WW Norton & Company, and NetGalley for my advance digital and physical copies!