Martians

Martians is a novel for young readers by the American writer Blythe Woolston, published by Candlewick Press in 2015. It is a satire of consumer culture, set close enough to the present to be uncomfortable.

Zoe Zindleman, whose numerical ID is 009-99-9999, has just started work at AllMART, where the smile is part of the uniform and the store is the centre of civic life. Her mother, AnnaMom, has moved away, and the family home is about to be foreclosed and stripped of anything valuable, so she has to decide where she is going to live.

Her options are the street or the Warren, an abandoned shopping centre inhabited by other children who have been left behind. Working alongside them, Zoe learns how much of the world outside the store has been swallowed by the world inside it, and how little of a person is left when the only value she carries is what she can spend. The title is a joke about the abandoned children, who might as well be from another planet.