It takes a special kind of author to make you care about a genre that you generally wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole: namely, anything involving sports. 
 Somehow, these sort of titles have always crossed my plate at some point with the seal of mandatory consumption adding further pressure to the inevitable: fumbling my way through terms I didn't understand, game-changers I wasn't sure whether or not I should care about, and the occasional romantic side-story that confused me because I'd spent so much time worrying about the terminology and rules that I wasn't even sure whether I should root for the couple now! 
 To be fair, Zeroboxer isn't a straight-up sports novel. There is boxing, yes, but it is interstellar boxing (with the added benefits of being a dystopian and having a diverse author and cast) and Lee does an epic job of keeping the stakes high, making all the aspects fast and furious and palpable, and yes, creating a pretty awesome protagonist in Carr Luka that it's hard not to get excited over (I mean, who can resist a guy who is there to be a big brother figure for a kid in desperate need of one?). 
 I wouldn't say it rang all the bells for me, but it did what it set out to achieve, along with feeling like one of those fast-paced reads that really, truly could be shaken out into a film adaptation, and that was what mattered.