A review by kblincoln
Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi
5.0
Riding my own wave of glee for Asian-American protags after seeing Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I've Loved Before I picked up Choi's Emergency Contact not expecting much.
Choi takes a Korean-American writer-wannabee with a MILF mom starting her first year of college in Austin, Texas, gives her a meet-cute with a coffee house baker with an alcoholic mom trying to raise himself out of debt and poverty...and gets me to snort out loud in the first 5 pages.
In thinking about a queen bee at high school who harassed her Penny thinks "In four days Penny would be off to college and the opinions of these micro-regionally famous people would no longer matter." I mean, "micro-regionally famous" just slew me.
Penny is introverted, thoughtful, imaginative, prepared, and while she suffers a bit from "why me" lack of confidence in terms of her relationships with her two friends (not caricatures, by the way. One is a super rich bossy abrasive girl and another is a too-sweet-to-be-true room mate, but somehow they outgrow those cardboard cutouts by the end of the book) and her texts with Sam.
Penny and Sam go instantly intimate with their texts, but the fun parts are as things grow more and more closer to real life. There's phone calls, and then dropping by Sam's coffee house. Meanwhile the both are dealing with mini-melt downs in terms of their loved ones.
I also loved how Penny saw Sam. He remembers being called AIDs because he was so chronically undernourished and skinny but she finds him beautiful in a totally believable way.
This is a YA/NA romance I would totally give my teenage daughters, despite the reference near the end to some sexual trauma. The story-within-a-story that Penny is writing for her class sometimes made me skim, but I could appreciate the meta artistry of it.
Terrific. People who like Rainbow Rowell and John Green will also love Choi.
Choi takes a Korean-American writer-wannabee with a MILF mom starting her first year of college in Austin, Texas, gives her a meet-cute with a coffee house baker with an alcoholic mom trying to raise himself out of debt and poverty...and gets me to snort out loud in the first 5 pages.
In thinking about a queen bee at high school who harassed her Penny thinks "In four days Penny would be off to college and the opinions of these micro-regionally famous people would no longer matter." I mean, "micro-regionally famous" just slew me.
Penny is introverted, thoughtful, imaginative, prepared, and while she suffers a bit from "why me" lack of confidence in terms of her relationships with her two friends (not caricatures, by the way. One is a super rich bossy abrasive girl and another is a too-sweet-to-be-true room mate, but somehow they outgrow those cardboard cutouts by the end of the book) and her texts with Sam.
Penny and Sam go instantly intimate with their texts, but the fun parts are as things grow more and more closer to real life. There's phone calls, and then dropping by Sam's coffee house. Meanwhile the both are dealing with mini-melt downs in terms of their loved ones.
I also loved how Penny saw Sam. He remembers being called AIDs because he was so chronically undernourished and skinny but she finds him beautiful in a totally believable way.
This is a YA/NA romance I would totally give my teenage daughters, despite the reference near the end to some sexual trauma. The story-within-a-story that Penny is writing for her class sometimes made me skim, but I could appreciate the meta artistry of it.
Terrific. People who like Rainbow Rowell and John Green will also love Choi.