The Lion of Mars

Holm is especially well known for her collaborations with her brother Matthew Holm, who illustrated the Babymouse and Squish graphic novel series, among other works. In several interviews, Holm mentions drawing inspiration from her own family history when writing historical fiction novels, a process which informed her first science fiction novel, The Lion of Mars (2021). In an interview for The Horn Book Inc. with Roger Sutton, Holm explains:

My first book, Our Only May Amelia, was about my Finnish-American family in Washington State. As I started thinking about what their lives were like, and talking to my family about it, they honestly may as well have gone to Mars when they left Finland. They never returned. It was a one-way trip, which is true for so many immigrants. [When] they arrived in America it was obviously very difficult, and I started thinking of their experience as being parallel to living on Mars. Instead of settling Mars in a high-tech, shiny way—a glass-encased bubble on the surface—I thought the technology would get us there, but living there would be more akin to what it had been like for my family (Sutton, Roger. “Jennifer L. Holm Talks with Roger.” hbook.com).

Holm’s fictional Mars settlement is also informed by real-life scientific experiments, which she mentions in the Author’s Note at the end of the book. The underground lava tubes that provide shelter to the settlers, traveling to Mars when its orbit brings it closest to Earth, and the use of algae as a food source are all details that scientists have researched as potential ways of making Mars livable for humans.

By mixing futuristic elements and inspirations from her family, Holm aims to explore the themes of The Dangers of Isolation and The Importance of Community, which are central to immigrant experiences throughout history. Rather than focusing on larger cultural impact, Holm uses a human-scaled perspective and imagines the day-to-day experience of Mars settlers:

What would it be like to grow up on Mars? Not a high-tech terraformed Mars, but a small, family farm version. What would daily life be like? Where would you play? What would you eat? Would there be chores? Who would be your neighbors? Most of all, what would a child growing up on Mars think of Earth—a place they had never visited but only heard about? (252).