The Martian by Andy Weir

Wow!  White knuckle reading for sure.  But, it did take a while for me to get to that place.  It begins with the reader being made aware that astronaut Mark Whatney has been left behind on Mars by his crew.  They think he is dead. A hellacious storm is headed their way and the crew makes haste to get from the HAB to

 the MAV to abort mission and head back to their space station home, the Hermes.  On the running (as much as you can in a spacesuit) trek to the MAV "flying wreckage slammed Watney carrying him off into the wind."  This detail comes halfway through the book, which is ok.
The author starts this story with Astronaut Watney regaining consciousness and realizing that he has been left behind by his crew.  Not their fault.  Truly an accident.
Andy Weir tells the story of Mark surviving alone on Mars, in the MAV and HAB utilizing everything he can find.  I do mean everything.  He tells it with humor that gave me a laugh-out-loud frequently.  The protagonist is an extremely resourceful and intelligent individual.  He is an astronaut, after all.  His calling is botany with mechanical engineering thrown in.
This book is well written, grammatically correct and sentence structure is good.  I did find it a little dry during the time that Watney was into a daily routine doing all things he knew he needed to do to survive.  I read through that and it picked up when he established communication with earth.  It was pretty exciting from that point on.
I know this has been made into a movie, with Matt Damon playing the part of  Watney and I could see Matt as the character of Mark Watney from the first page.  My copy is the newly released movie tie-in version so it may not read exactly as the original-not sure about that.
This is a debut novel from Mr.Weir that was first published in 2011.  The movie tie-in version which I read just came out and the movie is due soon.  It is a good book, and I recommend you get a copy and check it out.  I give The Martian four stars.  I received a complimentary paperback copy of this book from Blogging for Books, in exchange for an honest review.  These words are my opinion.
Thanks so much for being here!
Jeri~