Tick Tock

I'm not sure how I feel about a book being so centered on the character's Vietnamese identity being written by someone who apparently has no experience of it.
Was the manic pixie dream girl as much of a thing in 1996 as it was in the 2010s? Or was that thing funny back then? The author intended for this book to be a goofball comedy but that's not how it came across to me (then again they often fail for me because the “goofy” character that says “non-sensical” things just comes across as neurodivergent and “ahah neurodivergent person does neurodivergent things” isn't really funny so much as it is ableist), there were a couple funny moment but maybe the humor didn't age well?
True to Koontz's style there's a magical dog in this book (dog people gonna dog people I guess) so if that's a trope you enjoy it's there.
The end result for me was a cute and okayish book with a feel-good ending.