American Girl – Luciana

Erin Teagan's American Girl - Luciana is a Girl of the Year story for 9 year olds about a girl who has decided she's going to be the first girl on Mars.

Luciana Vega is eleven, and she's on her way to Space Camp for six days. She won a scholarship with an essay about planetary geology, on her third go at entering.

She has prepared. She's read every book on space robots she could find, practised eating freeze-dried food (yes, including the meatloaf) and ridden the carnival roller coaster six times in a row to make sure she won't be sick on the simulators.

She also has a purple streak in her hair, done at home with her best friend Raelyn, who has a matching one. A stripe of friendship while they're apart.

Her mum's a nurse and her dad teaches maths, and Luci is very clear that she's the family expert on space. When the woman at the desk asks her age, her mum answers, and Luci gives her a look. Astronauts speak for themselves.

Then her parents go, and she's on a bunk bed in a metal-walled room with four girls she's never met, wondering whether she's actually ready for any of this.

The thing your reader will enjoy most is Luci's enthusiasm, which is enormous and slightly too much. She sticks glitter letters on everybody's flight suits so nobody will forget them. One of her bunkmates, Ella, thinks that looks unprofessional and won't take hers.

That's the friction the opening sets up. Being the loudest and keenest person in the room is brilliant right up until it isn't, and Luci hasn't noticed yet.

Team Odyssey has a robot dog called Orion with disco lights and a wagging stub of a tail, and their first job is an EVA practice, which turns out to mean a space walk.

There's a lot of real space in here. Sally Ride is on the wall of the bunk room and Luci knows exactly who she is. There's talk of Mars missions, boosters and probes, mostly delivered by Luci in the voice of someone who knows everything about space rocks.

Home life is woven through it nicely. Her parents grew up in Chile and go back to help at the hospitals, and there's Spanish scattered about, along with her mum's merengue lucuma cake.

Worth knowing that her family are waiting to hear whether they can adopt a baby, Isadora, from an orphanage in Chile, and Luci is desperate for news the whole time she's away. For a child with adoption or fostering close to home, that thread may sit very near the bone.

For more of Luci, Braving the Deep sends her to astronaut training camp, where she's hoping for a place on a dive down to a habitat on the sea floor.