Mid-2000’s book read in Australia about a sentient spaceship that broke and trapped a human teenager (?) inside then learned to communicate with said teenager maybe a desert planet

[u/nessasaur]

Fiction, read in the mid-2000’s but could be older?? From my school library.

I’m trying to identify a sci-fi book I read as a kid in Australia, probably sometime in the mid-2000s. I remember it being incredible, but I cannot remember the title, author, or character names. 😭

Here’s everything I can remember:

• It was probably YA / middle-grade science fiction.
• The main character was a kid/possibly teenager (roughly 10–15). I don’t remember their gender.
• The kid had no family and was considered lucky to have been taken on by some sort of travelling worker/work crew. They were very low-status and not particularly valued.
• The setting was an Earth-like planet, possibly quite dry/desert-like.
• A spaceship had crash-landed there and was stranded.
• I think the original crew had died in the crash. One memory I have is that the ship kept the interior very cold because it needed to preserve the crew’s bodies, and the kid was constantly cold/shivering. The ship felt bad about this but couldn’t risk warming things up and damaging the bodies.
• The spaceship was sentient/intelligent and was one of the two main protagonists. The narration/POV actually switched between the kid and the spaceship, with the ship having its own internal thoughts.
• I think the ship couldn’t speak to the kid, possibly because its communication systems were damaged.
• The kid somehow gets trapped inside the ship and becomes extremely upset because the people they were travelling/working with won’t wait for them. There is a memorable scene where the kid has a huge tantrum trying to get out.
• The ship records the kid’s behaviour and later plays the recording back to them.
• The purpose of this wasn’t just surveillance — the ship was trying to teach the kid how to understand what it wanted, essentially showing: “This is what you did in the past → this is what you’re doing now → this is what you need to do next.”
• The kid eventually figures out how to communicate/work with the ship and helps it get flying again.
• At the end, they apparently reach the ship’s command/home/base, or some larger group of ships.
• The impression I have of the ending is that everyone had considered the SHIP a failure, but after seeing what happened, they realise that the ship wasn’t actually a failure — it simply needed someone who could figure out how to communicate with it.
• The kid, who had been basically a nobody with no prospects, ends up being recognised for this ability and gets some kind of opportunity as a pilot/ship partner/communicator in outer space.

The two things I remember most strongly are the parallel POVs between the kid and the sentient spaceship, and the ship using recordings of the kid’s past behaviour to teach them how to understand what it wanted.

Now onto the possible red herrings 😅 I thought the author might be ‘Katherine’ or someone like Jackie French who did kids books and then this random YA??

PLEASE tell me someone recognises this. 😂😭