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A review by sheilajenn
Arabella of Mars by David D. Levine
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
At least one of the stars here is there for being extremely my jam. I love sailing books. I love space. I love when weird fake science gets fully explored.
Still, of all the books like this I've read (which you can see in my list on here, "Sailpunk") this is one of the most exciting ones. Though plenty of time is spent explaining the ship (and I wouldn't have it any other way), stuff happens every chapter and there are lots of life or death struggles.
It has two main flaws. The first is the bad Regency dialogue. Some people seem to believe the Regency was a time when everyone spoke in long, formal paragraphs; and thus the actual spice of language gets filtered out. But that's almost standard. Hardly anyone pulls off dialogue that is both historically accurate and vivid.
The second is that the universe contains colonialism, and yet we're somehow supposed to accept that it's somehow being done in a way that isn't problematic at all. Do you really think the Brits of 1812, confronted with real aliens, would be less racist than they were against every real life country they colonized? Yet the Martians carefully follow English laws, and even when [mild spoiler] the English do something heinous against them, they're happy to avenge that one thing and then go back to letting the English build plantations to extract their natural resources. I understand why it's done that way: the author doesn't want to deal with a whole political struggle, at least not in book one. But it feels unrealistic to me that it isn't there.
Still, of all the books like this I've read (which you can see in my list on here, "Sailpunk") this is one of the most exciting ones. Though plenty of time is spent explaining the ship (and I wouldn't have it any other way), stuff happens every chapter and there are lots of life or death struggles.
It has two main flaws. The first is the bad Regency dialogue. Some people seem to believe the Regency was a time when everyone spoke in long, formal paragraphs; and thus the actual spice of language gets filtered out. But that's almost standard. Hardly anyone pulls off dialogue that is both historically accurate and vivid.
The second is that the universe contains colonialism, and yet we're somehow supposed to accept that it's somehow being done in a way that isn't problematic at all. Do you really think the Brits of 1812, confronted with real aliens, would be less racist than they were against every real life country they colonized? Yet the Martians carefully follow English laws, and even when [mild spoiler] the English do something heinous against them, they're happy to avenge that one thing and then go back to letting the English build plantations to extract their natural resources. I understand why it's done that way: the author doesn't want to deal with a whole political struggle, at least not in book one. But it feels unrealistic to me that it isn't there.