Rating: WARTY!
Amelia Lockheart (Earhart much?) is the Arsenal of the title, but the shorter version, Arse would have worked perfectly. The book is first person present tense which is awful. Even after I gave it a chance and let it play on it failed for me because it wasn't believable It was an audio book and the reader's voice (Emily Beresford) seemed completely wrong for the character and way immature for her age, which is 20 or so.
Amelia has only two claims to fame: she's supposedly an inventor genius, and her legs are paralyzed. She's also supposed to be on a quest to find out what happened to her parents, although she never actually pursues this despite her supposed genius. The thing is that she's a direct rip-off of Ironheart of the Marvel superhero universe with a solid dash of Iron Man. Wears a super-duper alloy mechanical suit that's highly weaponized? Check. She can modify the suit to do anything? Check! Parents not on the scene after car accident? Check (except in Ironheart, only daddy is out of the picture). She carries a nuke into the upper atmosphere to save an American city? Check. Yawn. Move along. There's nothing new to see here.
There is of course a plot against her by super-mega-hyper-corp which is what the author no doubt believes will carry this turkey through several volumes. Count me out. The problems are multiple. First person voice is too ridiculous to read unless it's done really well, and for an action story like this, the idea that the main character is narrating this through all kinds of deathly situations made it feel completely inauthentic to me. It made even less sense to start the story in the middle of a battle without any sort of a lead-in whatsoever. Were it not in first person that might have worked, but you can't have both and have me as an avid reader.
So I was turned off right from the start, but stayed with it for a while and started getting into it a bit, but the main character really wasn't interesting and was a consistent disappointment. The one thing I detested about Tony Stark was how selfish he was. Even on his best day he failed to be all he could be. I mean you heard talk about the 'Stark Foundation' or whatever it was called, but whatever it did, and however much he may have donated to it, still Tony Stark led a selfish, self-indulgent multi-billionnaire life, buying whatever he wanted whenever he wanted and squandering so much money.
That's not a quality I can admire in anyone. He had all this technology but never shared any of it. He never used his genius and technology, for example, to help people who had handicaps. Amelia has the same problem and it;s worse with her because she has one herself and knows directly what it;s like. In the story, she's often told that she could sell her technology and become rich, but with twenty million in the bank she ain't hurting. The thing is that she could have donated at ;east some of her technology to enable others to have the same mobility she enjoyed - and not to fly around bombing and sonic lancing villains, but just to be able to move and walk, and yet it never crosses her mind. How selfish is that? A real hero would have helped.
Worse, we really got nothing about the handicap she had to deal with - it was like it didn't exist except to get a mention in passing, because the suit nullified it and she was so rarely out of the suit. The worst part of this though was when she started swooning over another superhero type named Luke. He was your trope chiselled muscular type which really turned me off because it's such a cliché. Why not go the whole hog and name him Jack?!
There was a female character who got a lot of description about her looks - because as you know looks are the only important thing in the world. The way Amelia kept describing her made it sound like there was going to be a lesbian relationship in the offing and that would have been more palatable than Mr Steely Jaws, but Amelia doesn't lean that way or even question her obsession with Domino's looks, which begs the question as to why she's crushing so badly on this other character. Maybe because the author's male? It woudl be really interesting to see what a female author would have done with this story.
The worst part though was when Luke encounters Amelia out of her chair and immediately assumes she's had an accident and is helpless, which rightly pisses Amelia off, but just a few paragraphs beyond that, Luke has to carry her somewhere and she's all swooning and wilting over how strong he is. I about barfed right there and then and quit listening because it was so pathetic and hypocritical and a complete about-turn from where we;d been just a few words before. Yuk. Way to diminish your main character. I'm done with this story and this author and I will not commend it. This is about as warty as they get.
