American Girl – Luciana: Braving the Deep

Erin Teagan's Braving the Deep is a summer camp story for 9 year olds about a girl who intends to be the first girl on Mars.

What happens

Luciana Vega has already been to Space Camp once and loved it, so when six children from across the country are picked for a youth astronaut training programme, she's one of them.

The prize at the end is Cetus, a habitat on the sea floor that normally belongs to grown-up astronauts getting ready to leave the planet. The crew of six will live down there for a full day and night, run experiments and go out on space walks.

Before that come skills tests, practice dives and a partner project each.

Two things sit on top of all this.

The first is her little sister. Isadora came home from Chile two months ago, and the adoption moved fast because she has a heart defect and needs surgery. That surgery is booked for a few days after camp ends. Luciana keeps counting down to it without meaning to, and pulls all the petals off a dandelion while insisting she isn't thinking about it.

The second is Luciana herself. Every so often her heart just tips into panic. It happens in the first chapter, wedged sideways inside her sister's plastic toy car on the front lawn with her best friend laughing too hard to help. It's happened before, between a bed and a wall, and in a locked changing room at school. Nobody at camp knows.

She's about to spend a day and a night inside a metal box on the bottom of the ocean.

It's a warm book rather than a tense one. Luciana is enthusiastic in a way that's very easy to like. She actually claps when she hears there's a beach buggy. She and Raelyn have dyed matching purple stripes in their hair and call it a friendship stripe. The family speak Spanish at home and it runs through the book without any fuss at all.

Then a famous space inventor lands on the lawn in a helicopter, tells the children how lucky they are to be there, and leaves behind a daughter who has been put in the same six. You can feel exactly where that's heading.

What to read next

She has another book waiting after this one. In Luciana: Out of This World she flies to Chile for the winter holidays to see fifteen cousins she has been too busy to message, and being back with all of them is not the easy homecoming she'd pictured.