SF/F Review: Arabella of Mars by David D Levine https://t.co/lBm2jTL6Jr Short Review: 5 out of 10 (1/4)— garik16 (@garik16) November 3, 2017
Short Review (cont): A YA Tale of an alternate 1800s where a young woman dresses as a boy on a ship sailing to Mars is solid but (2/4)— garik16 (@garik16) November 3, 2017
Short Review (cont): unspectacular and sometimes utilizes some not well-aged tropes. Good potential but not one lived up to. (3/4)— garik16 (@garik16) November 3, 2017
Arabella of Mars is a young adult steampunk (well, clockpunk) fantasy novel that won last year's Norton Award (the Nebula's YA award) for best SFF young adult novel. Set in an alternate early 1800s in which it has been discovered that the space between the planets is filled with air and in which the major colonial powers have thus discovered it is possible to Sail to Mars (and Venus), the story follows a tomboyish young woman, the titular Arabella, who was born on Mars and has an aptitude and understanding automata and has to take a dangerous journey disguised as a male airmen on a ship traveling from Earth to Mars in order to save her family.
In large part, the book feels very much like a book written in an earlier time, before some sensibilities had changed. If you're expecting a subversion of some classic book tropes, you're looking in the wrong place - this is a pretty straight forward version of this tale. Unfortunately, even as a new version of a tale filled with classical genre tropes, it's....just sort of fine. Whereas some YA books are ones I'd recommend to readers of any ages (see my last review of In Other Lands), this one really won't interest readers above middle school age - and I'm not sure it'd be a must read of any type for even the target audience.
Final note before the jump: I listened to this as an audiobook, and the reader is pretty solid.
-------------------------------------------------------Plot Summary--------------------------------------------------
In this alternate world, it is discovered that the space between the planets is actually filled with air and specially equipped Sailing ships can sail to other objects in the solar system. The English have a colony on Mars (which also contains air in the atmosphere) and Napoleon's France employs privateers to hunt English crews, particularly that of the Honorable Mars Company (think the East Indies Company, but for Mars).
Arabella was born on a plantation on Mars, raised by a Martian nanny to be a bit more rambunctious than her proper English Lady mother would prefer. She knows about Martian culture (though her fluency in Martian is poor), how to move about in Martian gravity, and has a fascination in the working of Automata. But when she injures herself playing at night on Mars, her Mother separates her from her brother and takes her back to Earth, to her great sorrow.
However, when her cousin gets the idea to run to Mars to murder her brother for the family inheritance, Arabella finds that she has to find some way to get to Mars in order to stop him and save her family. So she joins the crew of a Mars Company ship, the Diana, dressed as a boy, as one of the lowest members of the crew - with one exception - as the "Captain's Boy" she is given instruction in how to use the ship's clockwork automaton navigator, a key part of the ship's operation. But can Arabella keep her secret, or just plain survive, on a ship facing threats such as a privateer, running-short-of-supplies, or plain mutiny? And will she be in time to save her brother from the actions of her murderous cousin?
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Again, this is not a book that intends to subvert classic tropes - Arabella is tomboyish, but this never questions her gender identity when dressed as a boy; the Martians are VERY much written like Native Americans (more on this below) and the book isn't interested in using them to examine Native treatment; etc. You could seemingly easily rewrite this book as a girl stowing away on a ship to the New World instead of to Mars, and it might still work (in fact those books have undoubtedly already been written).
For what it is, the book is definitely solid. Arabella is a fun character who is easy to like except for one quibble I'll get to below, and the rest of the characters in the crew, even if they aren't much different than standard tropes, are done well. The adventures of Diana are fun and the ideas involved - particularly one mid-voyage detour to an asteroid - are pretty coolly thought out. And while the whole book is written through Arabella's voice, that voice is mostly pretty well written (although it can get somewhat repetitive at times).
That said, as you can tell, even for what the book is, it has a bunch of faults which prevent it from being more than solid. Again, other than the Asteroid adventure, there's little of the ship's voyage that really feels any different from a ship's voyage across to the New World. By about halfway through the book, it gets irritating to read about Arabella struggling due to limitations placed by society on her due to her gender (again, the book isn't really interested in challenging this).
The book also features one of my least favorite tropes: the young female heroine falling in love with (and said love being reciprocated) the older male mentor. I don't know, it just feels awkward at best or inappropriate at worst for me, and while Arabella's romantic interest was believable, the other character's (not spoiling) interest was less so.
Finally, while I accept that the book isn't trying to be anything other than a fun adventure book, the use of Martians as essentially Native American stand-ins is a really poor choice. They're so obviously a stand-in that it's distracting at best, and while at worst...it kind of feels like the noble savage trope at times, which well....ugh.
A Sequel to this book has come out, but it appears I'll be passing on that one, as this is a book that just at best failed to stand out to me even when at its best.
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