Kung Fu High School -- Ryan Gattis

The first paragraph will set the scene:

The Good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King High School, that's the block-letter official name chiseled into the three-foot-thick concrete sign that sits in the dying yellow weeds in front of the cluster of buildings that was my school. First, it got called M.L. King or MLK, simple enough. Then there was King Junior to be more precise and that was because he started having a national holiday all to his posthumous self, but the word was never officially added to the title because everyone thought it would lead to confusion and people would think we were a junior high. That didn't stop us from calling it King Junior anyway. King Joony followed not long before it was mercifully shortened to King Joo. It never was KJ and I don't know why that is. But I do know that by the time Ridley was running drugs out of the school cafeteria, people in the city just knew us as Kung Fu.

This is a good pick for fans of anything ultra-violent, movies or video games or other books:

But a part of me believes that he wasn't quite dead when I rammed my own kinfe so deep into his left eye socket that part of the hilt disappeared and it didn't stop 'til it hit the back of the braincase.  I'd lined it up.  The eyeball made a squishing sound just before it disappeared and the four sharp edges tore through millions of myelin sheaths, ripping axon from dendrite, cutting cord after electric impulse cord, turning off the power in that fucked-up brain.

But other than that, not so much.  By the time I'd gotten to the end, it was starting to feel like a chore.  The action sequences themselves were really good, and I can totally imagine it being translated to comic book format or film.  (Oh, look.  I'm not the only one.)  The use of medical and technical terms worked especially well.  The diagrams and directions to make your own weapons (Kinfe is not a typo, by the way.) and armor were a nice touch.  But I never felt attached to any of the characters.  Part of that may have been deliberate -- Jen is understandably pretty emotionally closed off, but still. 

Not a single emotional connection for me = not a very enjoyable reading experience.