The Summit 1

Lee Young Hee – DramaQueen – 2010 – 8+ volumes

YES.  DramaQueen is back!  Not only that, but they returned with one of the two titles I wanted so bad it was criminal.  The only thing better than volume one of The Summit would probably be the third volume of DVD.  But I’ve desperately wanted to read The Summit after the author’s other work, You’re So Cool, became one of my favorite of Yen Press’s girly Korean series.

I was not disappointed.  It’s a lot like Totally Captivated so far.  The story opens with a lot of complications between the characters… and when I say “confrontations,” I mean a lot of guys get beat up.  A tall dark-haired guy gets his pocket picked on the train, and in the course of running down the thief, winds up in some sort of gang fight.  Lots of beatings, school quitting, and strange rendezvous between the two nameless characters later, they more-or-less live together, with a lot of strange flirting going on between them.  The characters are Moto (the small one) and Han Sae (the tall, dark-haired one), and of course they are about to embark on a smoking hot relationship.

There isn’t so much romance in this volume, just a lot of getting the characters established.  Han Sae was apparently stood up on his wedding day, and his fiancee decided to run off with his brother (?) instead.  This pushes him to quit school and take a terrible job in an effort to reinvent himself and forget his past.  Cheerful, pushy Moto is the one who more-or-less forces his friendship on the rougher Han Sae, and he’s also the one that gets followed around by the rough types.  In addition to the random gang that Han Sae beats up at the beginning of the volume, Moto also hides from other gangs, is chased out of his home by yet more rough types, and has an old boyfriend that is somehow not in prison anymore.

The romance is slowly developing, though.  Neither one is very forward, but they are growing closer through friendship, and their banter and flirting is extremely enjoyable.  There is even a drunk kiss at the end.  It’s easy to tell that it will pick up in later volumes, and I am very eager to see it develop.

As a cross between Totally Captivated and You’re So Cool (the main characters look and act a lot like the characters in that series, which is a shame in theory because of the duplication, but is fine since they’re good characters), it’s already in my good graces.  Not a lot happens that I can sink my teeth into in the first volume, but it was still really good, and I am really, really looking forward to more.  Everyone rush out and buy this so that can happen sometime before three years elapse.