Luciana Vega, the 2018 Girl of the Year, is a girl who loves science, specifically space. She is overjoyed when her essay wins her a scholarship to Space Camp, but what happens when she finds herself the team leader and drives her team to make bad decisions? She gets her team into a lot of trouble, but Luciana knows a good leader never gives up- on both the team goal and the people in it. Meanwhile, her parents are adopting a baby girl from their home country of Chile, Isadora, and she suddenly goes missing from the orphanage- another worry in Luciana's bigger problem of whether she'll be a good big sister- and a good leader. Later, Luciana gets lucky- she is one of only six kids picked around the country to go to youth astronaut training camp, where she has a chance to dive in an underwater habitat to train for space life! When she arrives, she's excited to see her friend Ella from Space Camp, but Ella quickly makes friends with another girl, Claire. Claire is the daughter of a rich businessman and boasts and brags a lot. When Luciana accuses Claire of sabotaging Ella's practice for the dive team, nobody believes her. Things get worse when, on the day of the diving habitat visit, Luciana gets in an underwater crisis. Luciana will have to persevere through her struggles, which includes worries about her baby sister Isadora's heart surgery back home, in order to get through camp. After, the Vega family travel to Chile to see Luciana's cousins. Luciana and her cousins reuniting doesn't go as planned, and Luciana doesn't feel like she belongs in the family. Her frenemy from Youth Astronaut Training Camp, Claire Jacobs, invites her to go to a Mars habitat in the desert and watch NASA scientists work. The offer is too good, so Luciana decides to give Claire a second chance and leave her cousins. Luciana isn't sure if she can trust Claire and if she has made the right choice. When disaster strikes in the desert, Luciana finds out if she has made the right choice and puts her people skills to the test.

It's that time of year again- the Girl of the Year 2018 countdown! The silhouette is on American Girl.com with a space background and a countdown to midnight on New Year's Day in the user's time zone. (The actual countdown is here on AGDN and will be in the background of Lea Clark's New Year's Eve!) There's no clue videos yet, but if there is, I'll let you know!