American Girl – Luciana: Out of This World

Erin Teagan's Out of This World is the third of the American Girl Luciana stories, a family book for 9 year olds about feeling like a visitor among your own relatives.

What happens

Luciana Vega is twelve, lives in Virginia, and intends to be the first girl on Mars. Her parents grew up in Santiago. She hasn't been back since she was in first grade.

This time the whole family goes for the winter holidays, which in Chile means the start of summer. There are more than fifteen cousins waiting, four of them exactly her age. Luci has messaged them the arrival time. She's pictured the welcome signs.

What's at the airport is Abuelita, on her own, in red reading glasses, at nearly midnight.

That's the shape of the whole book, really. Luci keeps finding the gap between the family she imagined and the one that's actually there. In Abuelita's loft the walls are covered in photographs of birthdays and graduations, and she's missing from most of them.

Then a message comes in, and it isn't a cousin. It's Claire, from the astronaut training programme, whose father builds rockets, who is flying to Chile that minute, and who says there's a Mars habitat out in the Atacama with NASA scientists still living in it.

The Spanish is lovely and easy to follow. Abuelita fires off three questions in a row and the English comes straight after, so a reader with none at all can keep up.

So are the small things. The cracked sugar bowl Abuelita won't replace, because her granddaughter dropped it playing waitresses and now she'll always remember that day. The slow-cooked asado. A rusted toy car that turns out to have been Grandpa's.

One thing about Claire. In an earlier book she left Luci shut in an underwater cupboard during a diving exercise at camp and swam off. That's told in the first chapter here, as something already over, but Luci still has nightmares about it and still panics in small spaces. It's referred to rather than shown, and it's why her mother is so cool about the friendship.

What to read next

For the beginning of all this, try Luciana at Space Camp. Six days, one enormous shuttle parked beyond the trees, and a girl who has practised eating freeze-dried meatloaf so she'll be ready.