In the Red (Christopher Swiedler)

In the Red
Christopher Swiedler
HarperCollins
Fiction, MG Action/Sci-Fi
***+ (Okay/Good)

DESCRIPTION: Someday, Michael Prasad can visit his father at the north pole of Mars, working on the quantum magnetic system responsible for the colony world's protective magnetosphere. Someday, his mother will stop hovering over him. Someday, when he no longer has his "condition", the panic attacks that seize him whenever he dons a suit to step outside the colony domes onto the Martian surface. Someday, he'll be normal.
Someday is never going to happen, and even at twelve, Michael knows it.
Sick of waiting for "someday", and being the only kid in the sixth grade without his basic rating for venturing beyond the airlocks, Michael sneaks out to try the test once more... and, again, is seized by crippling anxiety. It doesn't matter that he can do math in his head that most adults need computers (or at least pens and paper) to work out. It doesn't matter that he's read the field manuals backwards and forwards. If he can't conquer his panic attacks, he'll forever be stuck in the safety of the colony, cut off from countless career paths through the solar system - not to mention forever being the butt of his classmates' jokes. With the help of a rebellious friend, Earthborn girl Lilith, he sets off on an impetuous and ill-advised night trip to his father's polar station... just as a deadly solar flare strikes the red planet and something goes catastrophically wrong with the artificial magnetosphere, frying communications satellites and turning the daylight deadly with lethal doses of radiation. Stranded in the hostile wilds with dwindling supplies and limited air, Michael and Lilith must find a way to signal for help - or find a way to get back home.

REVIEW: Another quick audiobook "read", In the Red is a middle-grade survival thriller set on the surface of a futuristic Mars, where colonies may thrive but where the planet itself is still every bit as hostile to life as it is today, with dust storms and a toxic atmosphere and deadly solar radiation only barely held at bay by human ingenuity - ingenuity which can, as demonstrated in devastating detail, fail at any time. Even as a middle-grade title, the stakes are grim and not danced around; at more than one point, the characters openly acknowledge the dangerous nature of Martian existence and the many ways one can die, and when threatened by the possibility of a drawn-out death by solar radiation they readily accept the need for a "cleaner" and quicker way out by way of a lethal pill. Within this setting, Michael's book skills and prodigal grasp of science and mathematics, which should take him to the stars (literally and figuratively), never seem enough unless he can also spend five minutes in a suit without vomiting and passing out from panic; he considers himself a fraud and a failure, convinced his own father is ashamed of him, and thus behaves rather recklessly to prove to himself and others that he can be more than his "condition". This starts to get a bit over the top, when even in fraught survival conditions Michael keeps haring off on his own to do risky things (and fail as often as not) just to punch back against the inherently unpunchable reality of his panic attacks, endangering himself and his companions in the process. This is where the book first started losing its full fourth star, for all that the story moves fast and the characters are generally not stupid. The rest of that full fourth star was lost by the ending, which draws itself out a touch too long, particularly the bits after the climax. For the most part, though, In the Red is a fairly smart and science-based thrill ride of survival against overwhelming odds, on the surface of a world inherently inhospitable to human life.

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