Arabella of Mars - Q3
What did you think of the characters in the story? Were they interesting? Well drawn? Cartoonish? Ephemeral? Did you enjoy the love story of Araballa and Captain Singh? Did it work for you? How about the villain who went to Mars to kill Arabella's brother? Did you find the Martians intrinsically interesting? Were they developed reasonably? Would you be interested in following Arabella's further adventures?
Comments
They were fine for the type of book ie YA - I often wonder why SteamPunk in general attracts so many YA books and so few regular adult ones? So here Arabella solves nearly every problem herself to the amazement of all the adults around her - how does the world survive without all these young people like her? So I just took the limited characterisation with a pinch of salt and was happy with it.
I wish we'd learned more about the Martians (and the Venusians in the second book) but they were tackled in a fairly basic fashion.
As for the rest of the series, I enjoyed this one sufficiently that I bought #2 and at some stage in the future will probably get the third, but I have a bit of a backlog just now so thought I'd have a break from the Adventures of Arabella!
Paint-by-numbers caricatures. Even Singh was a bit of token representation.
Spoiler alert: in book 2 the marriage, which seemed on the verge of happening, gets postponed and partially derailed, thus keeping Arabella as a single agent rather than a married woman and (presumably) rather more subordinate to her husband.