Starhenge Book Two: A Kiss For Atticus #4 // Review
The machine approaches. A blus sinned savage with red eyes challenges the mahine to step forward to face a worthy adversery. The savage’s name just might be Daryl. (Or maybe its nt.) In any case, there’s someone there who is named Daryl. There’s a woman there who recognizes him. Writer/artist Liam Sharp comes harrowingly close to something almost coherent in chine to come forwawrd. Starhenge Book Two: A Kiss For Atticus #4. The final chapter of the current series has a great deal of emotional warmth that might actually have gone somewhere if there was a more substantial sense of grounding in storytelling.
The woman in question is named Amber.Daryl has been looking for her for a long time. And now there she is. Right. there. Right there in front of him. He is more or less speechless. Speech doesn't necessarily have to enter into it, though. She looks at him. He looks at her. They both know. They both know it's been a long time. And they both know that there's a connection there. There's a lot of reconcile. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot that's going to happen. Have to be resolved before the end of the first book.
The dreaminess of Sharp’s story is appealing enough. However, something gets lost in the process of sustaining a dreaminess about the narrative it for as long as the author has. Everything seems ever so slightly un more. It's hard to tell the exact emotional gravity of any given moment that being brought to the page because they're just isn't enough that is familiar to allow the reader placed make any kind of substantial connection. And so it all feels at least a little amorphous. And that's fine. It's just too bad. Because clearly there's great potential here for drawing in the reader on an emotional level. Sharp just isn’t doing that all that well.
The visuals are quite appealing. They'd be more appealing if they were delivering something that was Marco coherent. The emotional reality drawn into the faces of the characters feels quite vivid. The mood that is evoked by the overall layout and the color choices of the artist feels like it could really embrace something that would be very intense under the right circumstances. However, the right circumstances haven't really been met by the end of the second series of Starhenge..
Given the nontraditional narrative structure of the series it's really hard to judge individual issues. It's all a work in progress. However, any individual issue feels like a strange glimpse into somebody else's dream. And that's going to be disoriented in any case. But it's not going to be terribly engrossing. It's just going to continue to spiral in more and more abstract realms of narrative art. And it never quite gained enough momentum to really truly engage the reader in our level that would be terribly memorable. There's some poetry in the visuals. There's some poetry in the dialogues. There's some poetry in the narration. But it largely gets lost without any firm grounding in reality.
