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Any review of Stargun messenger has to start with the prose. Darby Harn is an artist with words. A poet. The language of this novel soars and swirls like oil on canvas, painting pictures and dreaming dreams that go far beyond the simple black and white of words on page. I envy this facility with language. I encourage everyone to take a look at this book just to experience wild flights of writing as an art form.
It’s greatest strength is also is greatest weakness. Stargun Messenger never pauses to explain. Before too long, I stopped actually understanding what was happening. Beauty, loss, love, fear… I experienced emotions guided by the author’s amazing ability to draw feelings out of the reader by an elegant turn of phrase or a word in a never-before-imagined context. But I didn’t understand what was going on.
The plot begins with a superb space opera setup. Our Heroine, Astra Idari, is a Stargun, a garden variety gun for hire who gets a lot of her work from an outfit called the Scath. The Scath have a monopoly on the fuel that makes faster than light travel possible, filamentium. Whenever someone steals it, the Scath pay Idari, or someone like her, to recover it. On just another mission to recover just one more batch of stolen filamentium, Idari, makes a horrifying discovery. Creatures of myth and legend, living stars known as Lumenor, are real. They exist. Idari meets one called Emera.
And the precious filamentium is nothing less than their blood.
The Scath suck the blood of living stars for starship fuel they can monopolize and profit on. And with that, the heroic quest is on.
If you want to enjoy Stargun Messenger, you must leave behind questions like “how does it work” and let the author guide you through an epic poem. Love is beautiful. Resistance to evil, even at the risk of everything, is glorious. Becoming who you were always meant to be is a fountain of joy.
At some point, though, a reader wants to be able to process what’s going on. The reader — this one, at least — hits a stage in this novel where one just wants Idari and Emera to “walk down a hall,” instead of waft on flights of hope until journey and destination merge elegant into singularity.
The Black Moment (Every romance must have a Black Moment, and this is assuredly a romance between Idari and Emera) loses it’s power because I don’t have a genuine understanding of what happened, only that the pain was abyssal anguish.
Judged by the beauty of its language alone, this could be the best book I’ve read in this contest. But in the end, beautiful language alone does not make a book. You must tell a story. Harn definitely did this, but I don’t really know what happened in it. The only thing I can say for sure is how it felt.
The book also has a political message. My review isn’t about that, only about the beauty of the prose and the entertainment experience of the book.
Grab your copy here, and I do believe you should grab one, just to experience such painterly expression with words.