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A review by melbsreads
Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine
4.0
Trigger warnings: death of a parent, explosions, war, violence. I think that's all?
3.5 stars.
So here's the thing: everything about this book is up my alley. It's steampunk. With space travel. About a badass teenage girl who disguises herself as a boy and gets a job on a ship bound for Mars to try and save her brother from her douchey cousin. With kind of Hornblower-y feelings about it. Uh, Y.E.S.
And for the most part, I really enjoyed it. Certainly, the beginning and the end were action packed and exciting. However, the middle chunk of the book - everything that happens on the ship - was...slow. I mean, it was still interesting. But it was slow.
My main problem with this, however, was the worldbuilding. Basically, we're told in the blurb that ever since Isaac Newton witnessed bubbles floating up from his bath, mankind has been travelling in space. But that's literally the only place the origins of space travel are mentioned. So we're just thrown into this world where there are ships flying off to Mars and Venus and the Moon all the time, and apparently people can breathe in space and there are asteroids with trees and animals on them. But there's no real explanation about how all of this came to be.
I'm also not QUITE sure who the intended audience is for this book. Levine has said in the questions section about this book that he wrote it as YA but that Tor chose to publish it as an adult book. And in a lot of ways, it kind of feels like both? There's nothing in it that would STOP it from being YA (with the exception of a romantic relationship that pops up right at the very end between a teenager and a grown ass adult, and even then, it's fine by Regency standards, so...?).
But I think this would also be a pretty hard sell with a lot of teenagers. I can think of...maybe 3 kids out of the 300 I take who would be happy to pick this up, and two of them are exclusively SFF readers and will read pretty much anything you throw at them from within SFF.
So yeah. I enjoyed it enough to read the second book. And I'm actually tempted to get a copy of it for work, because kids are way more willing to read historical fiction if there are SFF elements in it. But for me, I wanted way more worldbuilding than I got.
3.5 stars.
So here's the thing: everything about this book is up my alley. It's steampunk. With space travel. About a badass teenage girl who disguises herself as a boy and gets a job on a ship bound for Mars to try and save her brother from her douchey cousin. With kind of Hornblower-y feelings about it. Uh, Y.E.S.
And for the most part, I really enjoyed it. Certainly, the beginning and the end were action packed and exciting. However, the middle chunk of the book - everything that happens on the ship - was...slow. I mean, it was still interesting. But it was slow.
My main problem with this, however, was the worldbuilding. Basically, we're told in the blurb that ever since Isaac Newton witnessed bubbles floating up from his bath, mankind has been travelling in space. But that's literally the only place the origins of space travel are mentioned. So we're just thrown into this world where there are ships flying off to Mars and Venus and the Moon all the time, and apparently people can breathe in space and there are asteroids with trees and animals on them. But there's no real explanation about how all of this came to be.
I'm also not QUITE sure who the intended audience is for this book. Levine has said in the questions section about this book that he wrote it as YA but that Tor chose to publish it as an adult book. And in a lot of ways, it kind of feels like both? There's nothing in it that would STOP it from being YA (with the exception of a romantic relationship that pops up right at the very end between a teenager and a grown ass adult, and even then, it's fine by Regency standards, so...?).
But I think this would also be a pretty hard sell with a lot of teenagers. I can think of...maybe 3 kids out of the 300 I take who would be happy to pick this up, and two of them are exclusively SFF readers and will read pretty much anything you throw at them from within SFF.
So yeah. I enjoyed it enough to read the second book. And I'm actually tempted to get a copy of it for work, because kids are way more willing to read historical fiction if there are SFF elements in it. But for me, I wanted way more worldbuilding than I got.