Coming of Age on Mars: Unboxing Libby

by Steph Cherrywell, 2025 Little, Brown and Company

Libby Maxwell (“Max,” to her friends) is just like any other 12-year-old girl. She’s hoping to make new friends at a new school, she’s worried her mom is too overprotective, and she’s trying to figure out who she is. Except Max isn’t just like any other girl. Her new school is on Mars. And she’s a robot.

While the human colony on Mars is under construction, the corporation that oversees it has populated it with robots, to go through the motions of everyday life as a practice run before human occupants arrive. Except Max and her classmates aren’t state-of-the-art technological marvels. They’re A.I.Cademy girls — tie-in toys to a corny kids’ show, bought on the cheap and sent to Mars instead of the landfill. Their teachers are adult-model robots, but don’t know any more than the kids do. Their lunch is triangles of paper with the word “pizza” written on them. As far as the human world is concerned, they’re disposable junk, and treated as such, except they have their own hopes and fears and every messy emotion a real 12-year-old would. (Cherrywell does a terrific job of capturing the feeling common to both middle school and late-stage capitalism that the people in charge don’t really know what they’re doing and care even less.) 

Each of the girls comes pre-programmed with a one-dimensional personality. Wendys are brainy. Robins are sporty. Miracles love to perform. And Libbies are kind and helpful to a fault. In that spirit, Max sets her sights on Roxanne — a classmate based on the token villain of the kids’ show — and is determined to try and cheer her up. But in befriending Roxanne, she develops her own rebellious streak. Petty theft and vandalism help the two girls bond, but they’re certainly un-Libby-ike behavior. Max doesn’t feel like the other Libbies in her class (there are multiples of each girl, hence the nickname to set her apart). So is something wrong with Max?

That one simple question leads to a not-so simple interrogation of identity, friendship, and fitting in, and well as questions about technology, free will, and where artificial intelligence (not the 2020s plagiarism engine being marketed as “AI,” but future technology with actual intelligence) fits in to the human world. Like all the best sci-fi, Libby has a terrific premise that raises all kinds of scientific and philosophical questions, but that premise isn’t what the story’s about. Cherrywell grounds the story entirely in Max’s concerns, and the larger issues of sentience, colonization, terraforming, corporate indifference, and individual rights are all secondary to her story. (But no less interesting for that.)

The glimpses we get of the wider world (or solar system, as it were), come from the few humans Max encounters. They’re not treated much better than the robots — a technician lives with her family in an apartment that’s little more than a plastic shipping container, as spacious houses sit empty, waiting for a wealthier class of human. Yet she says she’s better off than the indentured servants working on Mars, and even they’re better off than most people back on Earth. Even the uncaring executive who runs the colony isn’t terribly happy with her position, subordinate to the even-less-caring corporation that runs things.

Yet Max’s story is about not just finding one’s self, but finding hope and community when the world around you seems to be going to hell, and damn if that isn’t a timely story for 2025. Underscoring that timeliness is Cherrywell’s afterword, in which she thanks people fighting against book bans everywhere, and people fighting for the rights of queer kids.

Those kids are a natural audience for Libby — Max’s assertion of self works as a very trans-specific allegory, but for a broader audience, it works equally well as a universal coming-of-age story about a middle school girl trying desperately to fit in, and find community among people she doesn’t entirely understand, who don’t entirely understand her. For middle grade readers, that’s timely in any era.