Podkayne of Mars is not one of my favorite Heinlein novels. Honestly, she just rubs me the wrong way.

Podkayne is supposed to be a genius-level young woman on a trip to Earth with her younger, amoral brother Clark. However, she is the classic girl who refuses to let men know that she has a brain so that they don't think she's competing with them, and is willing to let her dream of being a starship captain seem impossible.

Sorry, that just annoys me. Speaking as a former Physics major, I can tell you that I had no interest in letting the guys think I was less intelligent than I was. Yes, I stepped on some toes in my classes. It was fun, especially one lab partner who would just not listen to anything I had to say. If we disagreed, he would invariably go to the professor. The professor most often agreed with me. Fun, no? Well, I enjoyed it.

Now, as to the premise of the book, it is claimed that this is about how parents need to be there for their kids. However, the parents are minimally developed, and this moral really doesn't show that well. In fact, it only really shows up in the original ending, when Uncle Tom chews the mother out for not being there for her kids.

The only reason I'm mentioning the ending is because the copy I have has two endings. In one, Podkayne dies. In the other (originally published), she does not. My copy has reader essays on whether or not she should die. Both endings work well enough, although the originally published one with Uncle Tom's diatribe on how the mother should have been there more for her kids comes across as unnatural to me.