Breath of the Dragon by Shannon Lee & Fonda Lee

TL;DR: I think my expectations were too high and this was just… not for me.
Source: NetGalley, thank so much to the publisher!

Plot: Jun runs away to compete and become the Guardian, a government appointed super warrior. But learns some hard truths on the way.
Characters: This might have been one of the breaking parts for me. They felt very… predictable?
Setting: I didn’t have the clearest picture of the setting, but we were told a lot about it.
Fantasy: The idea here was very cool but I feel like we lost a lot of the fantastical for most of the book.

Thoughts:

I was so excited for this I bought myself a lovely physical copy before I’d even gotten very far in the eArc. So to say I’m disappointed, I mean I’m very disappointed. I entirely blame myself for that as I had very high expectations with Fonda Lee attached to this but alas, it didn’t work for me. Breath of the Dragon was pitched to me as a YA Fantasy based on the ideas of Bruce Lee’s style and training. Which sounds great, but didn’t connect for me.

This reads very young, something I beg of you to know going in. We have a lot of the very classic young adult – middle grade age level tropes here. A young man who is impetuous and very blind to the evils and darkness in his world. Jun is bound and determined to fight, just do martial arts. He’s so wrapped up in it he accidently gets half his family exiled while the other half goes to work for the government. So while he and his father live out their lives in poverty on one side of a divided country, his twin and his mother are at a training school on the other. Jun is very much not happy about this and it colors his story from the beginning.

I found a lot of the following twists and turns very predictable and there was just something here that kept me disconnected the whole time. I think this would be a hit for a young reader, especially one who loves martial arts. Unfortunately it wasn’t that for me.