A review by artsymusings
Permanent Record by Mary H.K. Choi
3.0
'Emoji in general are safe, but I should have sent the black heart. It's less a heart-heart in the love sense and more just a badass pictograph that shows how much I care without seeming like a sap.'
Ah, it's been a conflict city up here ever since reading this book! Even though I finished it back in October, I just couldn't sit and write down what I thought about Permanent Record. It's a good book since I highlighted so many lines (see the favorite quotes section below, hee), but it didn't bowl me over completely. I guess, I feel like this book tried to be a lot of things or rather, tried to have the main character go through as many life experiences as it could and that just didn't work in its favor.
At its core, Permanent Record is about Pablo hurtling towards total self-destruction evident all the more due to the stream of consciousness narration. As such, I highly appreciate books that explore failure in all its highs and lows and Permanent Record is definitely such a book. However, it gets simply tedious being inside Pablo's mind for the entirety of the book and it doesn't help that he's a grade a self-sabotager in extreme denial and depression and just not doing anything about it at all.
And that's exactly wherein the problem lies because I just didn't have the patience for Pablo to move from one bad decision to the next and pretty much spent reading most of the book hoping that the entire ordeal be somehow over and done with soon. It's ironic because I myself have gone through such a stage in my life, but I annoyed myself so much with my behavior that tolerating a fictional character going through the same thing easily made me see red. Heh.
So safe to say that while I appreciate the story Choi wrote, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I was hoping. For the most part, the story is about Pablo and his struggles and yet every other character or thing that happens to him reads like yet another lesson to be learned more than an organic progression of the story for the sole purpose of seeing just how much could Pablo take and what he'd end up doing as a result of this new thing that has now happened. Sigh.
When it comes to representation, I loved that Pablo is Korean Pakistani and it was great seeing him have discussions about being biracial with Leanna Smart, who's half-Mexican and half-white, even though I don't feel that her character was developed more than a caricature of a world famous pop star. It kind of feels like she was only present in the story just so Pablo could judge her from every angle, which was infuriating since Pablo has none of shit together to warrant such behavior. That's actually also true of how he treats his friends and people in general. He does realize this bad habit of his eventually so points for character development, I guess.
Most importantly, I would 100% read a book about Rain, Pablo's younger brother. This middle schooler tried to sell vibrators at his school, what a legend LOL. Pablo's sibling dynamic with Rain was also my favorite thing about the book even though Pablo did screw things up with him, too (ง •̀_•́)ง
I also have to mention Pablo's parents and how realistically they were written. Fear of disappointing your parents is very much something that's ingrained in Asian cultures and while it's apparent that parents do love their children, it can be very hard to come clean about the huge messes in your life to them. In Pablo's case, they did try and intervene on their own, which was something to see but Pablos is Pablo afterall, ha.
Anyway, I really do hope I like Choi's Emergency Contact better than I liked this, but I'd still recommend Permanent Record to anyone who'd like to read about a character actively not dealing with his failures and being a mess of a human being in general. Oh and Pablo's snack making skills are amazing and I now believe that snacking is truly a form of art.
Favorite quotes: 'I care about everything equally until I care about so many things I get overwhelmed and care about nothing at all.'
'What've you been up to?
'I have stood right here since you left. Contemplating mortality and the human condition. I power down when my shift's over.'
'But home isn't a place, he comes to realize; it's wherever you find acceptance and support.'
'I can't adult. Most days I can barely human.'
'So, what's the distance between your true self and how people perceive you?'
'I'm going from zero to sixty for fight-or-flight responses, and I'm ready to pulverize a crew of thugs or hop aboard a plane with a "very particular set of skills."'
'Life's hard, man. Trying to get better at the thing you want to be the best at is humiliating.'
'I've bristled whenever people say they're proud of me. It's so patronizing and presumptuous—as if their satisfaction was chief among the reasons to do anything—'
'Life isn't a destination. It's the continual practice of things that make you wiser and happier.'
Ah, it's been a conflict city up here ever since reading this book! Even though I finished it back in October, I just couldn't sit and write down what I thought about Permanent Record. It's a good book since I highlighted so many lines (see the favorite quotes section below, hee), but it didn't bowl me over completely. I guess, I feel like this book tried to be a lot of things or rather, tried to have the main character go through as many life experiences as it could and that just didn't work in its favor.
At its core, Permanent Record is about Pablo hurtling towards total self-destruction evident all the more due to the stream of consciousness narration. As such, I highly appreciate books that explore failure in all its highs and lows and Permanent Record is definitely such a book. However, it gets simply tedious being inside Pablo's mind for the entirety of the book and it doesn't help that he's a grade a self-sabotager in extreme denial and depression and just not doing anything about it at all.
And that's exactly wherein the problem lies because I just didn't have the patience for Pablo to move from one bad decision to the next and pretty much spent reading most of the book hoping that the entire ordeal be somehow over and done with soon. It's ironic because I myself have gone through such a stage in my life, but I annoyed myself so much with my behavior that tolerating a fictional character going through the same thing easily made me see red. Heh.
So safe to say that while I appreciate the story Choi wrote, I didn't end up enjoying it as much as I was hoping. For the most part, the story is about Pablo and his struggles and yet every other character or thing that happens to him reads like yet another lesson to be learned more than an organic progression of the story for the sole purpose of seeing just how much could Pablo take and what he'd end up doing as a result of this new thing that has now happened. Sigh.
When it comes to representation, I loved that Pablo is Korean Pakistani and it was great seeing him have discussions about being biracial with Leanna Smart, who's half-Mexican and half-white, even though I don't feel that her character was developed more than a caricature of a world famous pop star. It kind of feels like she was only present in the story just so Pablo could judge her from every angle, which was infuriating since Pablo has none of shit together to warrant such behavior. That's actually also true of how he treats his friends and people in general. He does realize this bad habit of his eventually so points for character development, I guess.
Most importantly, I would 100% read a book about Rain, Pablo's younger brother. This middle schooler tried to sell vibrators at his school, what a legend LOL. Pablo's sibling dynamic with Rain was also my favorite thing about the book even though Pablo did screw things up with him, too (ง •̀_•́)ง
I also have to mention Pablo's parents and how realistically they were written. Fear of disappointing your parents is very much something that's ingrained in Asian cultures and while it's apparent that parents do love their children, it can be very hard to come clean about the huge messes in your life to them. In Pablo's case, they did try and intervene on their own, which was something to see but Pablos is Pablo afterall, ha.
Anyway, I really do hope I like Choi's Emergency Contact better than I liked this, but I'd still recommend Permanent Record to anyone who'd like to read about a character actively not dealing with his failures and being a mess of a human being in general. Oh and Pablo's snack making skills are amazing and I now believe that snacking is truly a form of art.
Favorite quotes: 'I care about everything equally until I care about so many things I get overwhelmed and care about nothing at all.'
'What've you been up to?
'I have stood right here since you left. Contemplating mortality and the human condition. I power down when my shift's over.'
'But home isn't a place, he comes to realize; it's wherever you find acceptance and support.'
'I can't adult. Most days I can barely human.'
'So, what's the distance between your true self and how people perceive you?'
'I'm going from zero to sixty for fight-or-flight responses, and I'm ready to pulverize a crew of thugs or hop aboard a plane with a "very particular set of skills."'
'Life's hard, man. Trying to get better at the thing you want to be the best at is humiliating.'
'I've bristled whenever people say they're proud of me. It's so patronizing and presumptuous—as if their satisfaction was chief among the reasons to do anything—'
'Life isn't a destination. It's the continual practice of things that make you wiser and happier.'