Reading Robyn

Very Important Note: According to animenewsnetwork.com in this post here: Honey Hunt Goes on Hiatus, Author Reveals New Manga Honey Hunt was officially put on hiatus by Aihara, back sometime in 2009. It's been over a year since the last complete volume (Volume 6) was published here in North America, with no news on the series continuation. This is something that should be noted if you are interested in starting this series! It is currently uncompleted and doesn't have an ending. What happens when you have terrible parents but lack a spine? What happens when the first time you finally speak your mind its on national TV? What happens when you decide to take control by becoming your own person and breaking out into acting? What happens when you're less then stellar at acting?Honey Hunt has a lot of good things going for it. The one thing that kept dragging me back into the story was that the book reads like a Japanese TV-drama. In this case that comparison is a great thing. The storyline is good and its been set up in a way that can be taken to a lot of interesting places. BUT everything is riding on how attached you are to the main character, Yuri. She's easy to sympathise with but the story moves along so quickly that you need to hold onto that sympathy in order to keep up. The characters that were introduced seem quite interesting and their relationships with Yuri are already starting to take shape by the end of the book. The love interests look especially promising!Probably my favourite part of the entire volume was the mother character and her dialog with her daughter; it was perfectly written. The story is all about Yuri just trying to prove herself in the only way she thinks her parents will acknowledge. Unfortunately one the other side of things, Honey Hunt had problems. Most of my issues have to do with flow. Whether it be the story/characters or the panel design, the one major thing that Honey Hunt lacked for me was floooooooooow.The author was in one hell of a rush to set up her plot, establish every characters, and move the frick along. It was just too much information for me all at once. The narrative needed to take a breath between major plot points. Introductions are made, then love interests, quickly flowed by the love triangle, then followed by the main story line, then the people in that one place, then that other thing and then, and then, I've forgotten most of it already. I feel like this should have been more spread out. For the tone of the story the pacing just doesn't bode well with me.And then there is most importantly the art. I'll start off with some positive raving. The deigns were all great! Each character was an individual and there was a lot of expression in each panel. But there in lies my problem, the panels. I did not like them. The panels are staggered, overlay, and slashed into each other. This kind of style can work great in certain situations (like fight scenes, dramatic running, great sudden impact moments) but here it was not done in a consistent way. It didn't read well for me. It lacked flow. Not everyone will find this as big of an issue as I do, but these are the sort of thing I pay attention to when reading this type of material. Also, the little wispy line after some the speech bubbles, I didn't like that either.Overall, because of the story has such promise I will be reading the next book. Hopefully Volume 2 will weigh more towards the positive then the negative and I'll just try to block the panel design.