Bill Hiatt
Autor de Living With Your Past Selves
Series
Obras de Bill Hiatt
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
- Nacionalidad
- USA
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Santa Monica, CA, USA
Miembros
Reseñas
Premios
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 10
- Miembros
- 24
- Popularidad
- #522,742
- Valoración
- 4.8
- Reseñas
- 5
- ISBNs
- 8
I have been grumbling lately for a good read, and while some of the books I have been picking up lately have been a few notches up the enjoyment scale, it's been a while since I have read a book that merited the elusive 5 stars. Luckily, Different Lee not only earned the accolade on its own merits, the book was a pleasing easygoing read. The faster I finish a book, the more books I read, and the more reviews I write. Win!
Now, the plot of this book intrigued me. Modern urban fantasy isn't my primary reading genre, and I was a bit iffy about the book at first. DL (his full name is Different Dragon Lee, ergo he really, really, really hates his birth name, and it also serves as a fun running gag in the story), is an ethnically Korean highschool dropout who ran away from his foster family the second he turned 18 and has been drifting from one town to the next working as a self taught auto mechanic, seemingly enjoying the freedom offered by working dead end jobs and something even more important to him: scoring with the ladies.
It seems like the women in a rundown village called Le Dragon in rural Wisconsin are suffering from asian fever, and DL can't seem to recall the last night he slept alone in his dingy apartment... much to the annoyance of his well-meaning landlady who treats him like her son, much to his annoyance.
DL's one nighters supply is starting to run dry, and he's already pondering packing up his bags and going somewhere else... More specifically, he slept with a really attractive woman who was apparently really crummy in the sack, and sorta wants to pack things up before she goes all stalkerish on him. But first, DL has to clean up a strange puncture wound on his neck. I guess goth chick is into vampirism or something...
Wait... could he have just slept last night with a real vampire? And now not only does she have the hots for him, a cranky ghost also epicly wants to get into his pants as well? A harem-tastic adventure ensues... and if appeasing supernatural/undead women wasn't weird enough, maybe the fact that he's starting to transform into an Asian dragon and along the way, avoid a madman named "The Collector" from kidnapping him to use as his guinea pig might make his life a tad bit difficult.
But DL isn't alone in this mad quest. After shunning a coworker after he called him a Dumb Loser, DL starts to form an interesting friendship with a geeky fantasy nerd named Max, who actually feels thrilled that he has been unwittingly dragged into DL's supernatural problems.
Is DL superficial at first? I think that is the whole purpose of his voyage. He is no Mary Sue, and doesn't really care. When confronted with his shapeshifting and Korean background, he hurls insults, while at the same time, starts to feel a connection he didn't initially feel towards Ekaterina and Max which wasn't there at first as a consequence of being abandoned after birth. The book is infested with good jokes, keeping things lighthearted, but full of action and character development chapters. If there was only thing that disappointed me about the story, it would be that Ekaterina seemed too much like a damsel in distress trope. I would have wanted the romance bubbling between the two characters during the course of the story, and instead Ekaterina is usually unavailable because she has been captured.
The book at the end promotes a sequel which doesn't seem to have been released yet, which is a shame. All in all, the book could very well be a solid standalone novel. I certainly had a lot of fun reading it.… (más)