Upon first hearing the premise of this novel, I had a very strong inclination that it would be a perfect book for me. Although I love the more fantastical elements of science fiction (I don't have an entire row dedicated to Star Wars novels for nothing, you know) I always have loved stories that explored mankind's scientific expansion and later colonization into space. So along comes this book about a regular present day earth based astronaut getting trapped on Mars and having to MacGyver his way into not starving until the next Mars mission lands in 4 years time? Count me in, I am 100% on board! 
 I have to say that this book did not disappoint my high expectations. It was a wondrous mix of high stakes drama, strange gerry-rigged science, survival with a peppering of humor to take the edge off of the tone. The humor in particular was excellent. The majority of the book is written through entry logs that Mark is writing while he spends his time on Mars and thankfully he's a pretty easy going guy. With such an intense, low probability of success scenario facing our protagonist, it would have been so easy to turn this book into a depressing dirge of hopeless thoughts. Mark's wise cracking humor and sometimes deluded for the sake of mental preservation optimism kept the tone at a manageable level and made reading this very enjoyable. When reading his entry logs, it took a small adjustment period for me to grow accustomed to the less refined voice than I was accustomed to novels having, but once you understood Mark's character, the more colloquial writing style made perfect sense. 
 One minor detraction I will say is that although Mark tries his darnest to explain the technobabble and engineering issues in a way that the layman could understand, I was still lost sometimes. Thankfully, most of the time the specifics didn't matter. "so if the drill is operating at 9AMPs of power and is outputting that at a rate of x...[skims through a line of numbers until Mark gives the explanation] Oh, so what this means is that the drill overheated and this is very very bad news (or in Mark's voice, "We're f--ed.") 
 I highly recommend this book if you at all find the premise intriguing. Mark's voice takes some getting used to but I wouldn't had wanted to follow anyone else throughout this harrowing journey. Oh, and as a quick sidenote, it would be AMAZING if Wil Wheaton did the narration of the audiobook. I think that Mark's personal voice fits with Mr. Wheaton's tremendously and the whole time I was reading the entries, I was hearing Mr. Wheaton narrating it in my head.