Review: Arrow of Fortune

Arrow of Fortune by Jacquelyn Benson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The world tour continues, with our characters off to India this time, the origin of a quarter of Constance's heritage.

The improvement in mechanics continues from book to book, which is great to see. Here, the main issue I noticed was that the author puts a comma after "of course" when the sentence is simply agreeing with a previous statement, which is not usual usage (MS Word will recommend it, but, as is so often the case, MS Word is wrong). Otherwise, it's pretty clean, though I did spot a few Americanisms, anachronisms and vocabulary errors. I had a pre-release version from Netgalley for review, so these minor issues may well be fixed for publication.

Even though I'd read the other books comparatively recently, I didn't remember their plots as well as I probably needed to in order to pick up on everything that was mentioned from the previous books. The characters themselves are strongly enough drawn that I remembered them, though.

The book wears its politics openly; the late-19th-century protagonists share common early-21st-century attitudes to race, imperialism, colonialism, homosexuality, and sexuality in general, while acknowledging that this sets them against the norm of their society.

There are two strong romance subplots, different from each other, one involving a woman who is dead set against the institution of marriage but wants to be with her beloved openly, and the other involving a couple who are in the process of discovering that they want to be a couple, despite their very disparate personalities. Throughout, there's a strong theme of how important it is to accept people as they truly are without asking them to change, which I'm not sure is a great idea in its very strongest form. Part of the point of opposites attracting, for me, is that they moderate each other towards more balance by learning from each other's strengths, and I didn't see that brought out explicitly, though it might be happening implicitly.

Anyway, this manages to be inspired by thrilling pulp novels while having a 21st-century consciousness, and mostly succeeds in walking the tightrope between those two. It's a well-done series, and I look forward to the next episode, which looks like it will occur in Korea.

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