I realise Watney wasn't supposed to have much personality but this made it feel a bit soulless for me. It felt to me that it's a story very much written for an American audience. It's overwhemlingly "If you want something hard enough, you can make it happen". America's culture is very much in to self-improvement and there's a belief that there's a fix for every problem, if you want it enough; in my opinion most Brits aren't quite like that. I realise the book would be a bit less exciting if it weren't for the repeatedly "fix-it" nature of the plot, but it just seemed that toward the end I felt like I wasn't worried anymore because there would always be a solution no matter how dire a situation he seemed to find himself in. I found the ending particularly underwhelming, as it had seemed obvious that he would surivive from about the middle of the book. Maybe the point was that you were supposed to be excited about how he would work out a way to survive, but I was more excited by whether or not he was going to surivive at all, and it felt like a certainty far before the final chapters. Even the miraculous scientific solutions didn't prove interesting to read towards the end, as they seemed to come completely out of nowhere. The suspense that existed in the beginning and middle of the book ran out of steam to a point where by the end, I was hoping for things to go wrong just for there to be a bit of uncertainty
:edit: Reading this brought back strong memories of a book I read as a child. It was about a boy on holiday with his parents in the country that somehow gets left behind. I'm not sure how the parents don't instantly notice that they don't have their child with them... but anyway the kid has to fend for himself in a shelter/cave/something, he finds food in a nearby farm, generally overcomes his fears and grows as a result of the experience. Parents come back and take him home, the end. I can't for the life of me remember the name of this book or find anything about it after googling quite a lot about it. I remember specifically there being quite a bit of detail about some cheese that he steals/acquires. Am I mad or is this a real book?!