adelacacovean

I jumped when I saw this book in NetGalley's Read Now list, up for review. An ARC of a stand-alone graphic novel? 24 relationships explored in sequential arc clouds? What could go wrong? (You probably see it, I didn't when I hit the request button) I'm gonna tell you in case you haven't anticipated it: everything. Yeah, it was that bad.

Don't get me wrong, maybe you will love it, the concept is really intriguing and that's what brought my attention to it. But I'm gonna explain a little about why it didn't work for me and I had to drop it after reading 60%.
Well, the first reason would be that it is going to be archived in 2 days and I:
1. have no motivation of finishing it today, nor tomorrow
2. definitely not buying it, that would be called masochism

Anyway, I was expecting the story... actually the stories to be somewhat intertwined with one another - and maybe they were and I just didn't realise it because it was so confusing at times! Every art cloud showed different characters and different stories and after some time you realise they are actually 24, entagled. But when you read those stories like that... how can I put it? It's like reading 24 different books, a page from each one and then you go to the next one and next one until you get back to the first one and so on until you eventually finish all those books.

Maybe I don't see the bigger picture. Maybe the actual story, the message the author was trying to convey is that our lives are not so different from each other, that pieced together they form the puzzle that is humanity. I'm just saying. Because maybe, just maybe, I wanted to like this book so much that I'm trying to come up with anything to save it. But I will say that it would've been much, much better if all the characters were more uniquely drawn, so that you could tell one from the other (because it's all black and white) and obviously, add a splash of colour if we are on this topic.

After all, what this book tried to do is really unique, but it failed in my eyes. I do think though that some of you will really enjoy it. As for me, I can see the potential this could have as a short animation.