Marsbound (Joe Haldeman) - [Marsbound 04]

Young Carmen Dula and her family are embarking on the adventure of a lifetime-they're going to Mars. But Carmen's rebellious streak leads her to venture out into the bleak Mars landscape alone, where she is saved by an angel. An angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad-and a message for the humans on Mars: We were here first...

From Publishers Weekly

Hugo and Nebula–winner Haldeman infuses this yarn with his teen narrator's intelligent curiosity. Carmen Dula, part of the first human colony on Mars, looks like a typical young adult heroine: distanced from her parents, irritated by her bratty younger sibling and beset by tyrannical colony administrator Dargo Solingen. Then she accidentally discovers real Martians living in an underground city and has to convince Solingen that her story is true. When the Martians reveal a terrible threat to life on Earth, it's up to Carmen and her friends to save the day. Recalling Robert A. Heinlein's Red Planet and Podkayne of Mars, Haldeman updates the Martian setting while keeping faith in his characters' ability to respond to unexpected challenges. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

The career path of recent high-school graduate Carmen Dula takes an adventurous turn when her family wins a lottery that sends them to the first human settlement on Mars. After an alternately tedious and exhilarating six-month journey, Carmen gets her first taste of living under a crimson sky while butting heads with authoritarian colony leader Dargo. In fact, it’s a fateful run-in with Dargo that prompts Carmen’s rebellious solo walk on the Martian surface and near-fatal plunge into an underground cavern. Her unimaginable savior is a multilimbed, potato-headed creature that has apparently been living with his brethren under the Martian surface for untold millennia. When the astonishment of first contact gives way to an orgy of study by the colony’s xenobiologists, a new shock presents itself—the Martians are the artificial creation of a distant alien race dubbed the Others, to whose universe humans are definitely not welcome. As one of sf’s most consistently inventive storytellers, Haldeman gets bountiful mileage out of this ingenious blend of Martian exploration and extraterrestrial anthropology. --Carl Hays