Juniper’s query got here because the household (together with Warga, her husband and older daughter, Lillian) watched the launch of the latest rover, Perseverance, in July 2020. As everybody else clapped and cheered, 3-year-old Juniper requested, “Mama, do you think the robot is scared to leave home?”
“What an act of imaginative empathy,” Warga informed KidsPost by telephone from her dwelling within the Chicago space. “She really put herself in the perspective of the robot and wondered what it might be thinking and feeling, and that gave me the idea” to make the rover a important character.
Because the e-book was largely written in the course of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, Warga needed to do most of her analysis at dwelling. She based mostly Res on the rovers Curiosity and Perseverance and issues that they had encountered on Mars, and she or he discovered a lot about them from the NASA web site concerning the Rover program (mars.nasa.gov/mer) and a memoir by the chief engineer for Curiosity.
In summer time 2021, Warga and her daughters had been in a position to view a mannequin of the Mars rover once they visited the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland. After having imagined and written about a rover’s ideas and emotions for thus lengthy, seeing the mannequin “felt a bit emotional,” mentioned Warga. “It was like seeing a friend.”
‘Chase wonder and curiosity’
As a child, Warga was intensely fascinated by tales and writing. She liked the novels “Ella Enchanted” and “The Giver.” And she remembers her mom studying “Charlotte’s Web” to her as a little one, a e-book that, in flip, she has shared along with her daughters.
Growing up in Ohio with a father who emigrated from Jordan, she typically felt like she was attempting to determine out the place she slot in. “I never felt like I quite had a foot in any world,” she mentioned. She typically felt out of place when visiting her father’s Middle Eastern household in Jordan and in her principally White public faculty in Cincinnati.
She drew upon these emotions to create “Other Words for Home,” a novel in verse about a woman who emigrates from Syria and tries to search out a place for herself within the United States. The e-book gained a Newbery Honor in 2020.
Warga’s new novel explores these similar emotions. Res, too, should determine out the way to survive in a new place. Even although he’s a robotic, “Res is probably my most autobiographical character,” mentioned Warga, with a giggle. “Res worries, and I worried a lot as a kid.”
In visiting faculties, Warga has discovered that younger persons are fascinated by what’s being found on Mars and by the hazards confronted by Res and Fly, his pleasant drone companion. Students are intrigued by the engineering talent required to assemble these robots. And they’re curious concerning the scientists Rania and Xander and their work with Res, and about Rania’s daughter Sophie, who writes to the rover.
Both science and writing draw on the identical mind-set and expertise, Warga likes to inform her younger viewers. She is a author who has additionally taught sixth-grade science. “Scientists and writers chase wonder and curiosity,” she mentioned. “They pay attention to the world and share what they learn with others.”