Emergency Contact

Writing the book review for Emergency Contact by H.K. Choi three months post-read is not the most efficient way to detail the aforementioned book’s plot and characterization but what’s done is done and here we are. Three months later. Whoops. My deepest apologies everyone.

           Anyway, Emergency CONTACT not CONTRACT as I keep wanting to say, is about a Korean-American girl named Penny who is moving a measly forty-five minutes away from home to start the beginnings of her long-awaited college career and begin her desperate aspiration of becoming the next J.K. Rowling.

You have the pretty cliché trope of Penny hating her mother for being gorgeous and overly involved in her life and an exaggeratedly-over-the-top flirt with everyone’s dad but not much other reasoning is given.

           Problem #1: Penny kind of sucks. Don’t get me wrong. I love that Penny is a diverse representation of a demographic of people that aren’t habitually seen in YA novels by being Korean-American.

I also love that Penny obviously struggles with anxiety and other mental health issues like possible OCD not because those are things are desired to have and revere, but because many people struggle with mental health disorders like anxiety and severe OCD and seeing them represented in fiction is always highly welcomed and explored.

          However, these traits also present several problems.

         Problem #2: I understand that this is a fictional novel and that authors can write about characters that are different from them culturally, ethnically, and a multitude of other traits but I found it intriguing that Mary H.K. Choi is a Chinese-American author writing about the experience of a Korean-American teenager. Not that Choi is not allowed to do this or shouldn’t do this, but I did wonder considering her background as a Chinese-American author why she didn’t draw from her own experiences and background.

           Problem #3: In addition, Penny’s mental health issues are never really addressed. Not really. Her roommate goes to therapy “just for fun” but Penny, who could probably benefit from therapy, doesn’t ever seem to get help for it other than becoming addicted to chatting with someone she doesn’t really know via text messaging.  

           Which brings me to our other main character: Sam. I really wanted to like Sam. I really, really did. I definitely admit to having a type for “bad” boys who seem dark and emo but then end up being soft and squishy human beings that enjoy working at bakeries and cry over their old girlfriends. However, unfortunately, I found Sam to be more annoying than anything.

           Homeboy cannot get his life together.

           I understand that Sam comes from poverty and that his mother should be reported for negligence and verbal abuse, but Sam concedes to his situation, lives in the upstairs room of a bakery where he most likely makes minimum wage, sleeps on a bare mattress on the floor, pines after a girl that definitely manipulated him physically and emotionally, and cannot seem to end the vicious cycle of his days.

           This may seem a bit harsh, but I definitely feel like Emergency Contact is a story about two people who need help in many different areas of their life and becoming obsessed with DM’ing an anonymous stranger through on app should not be the end all be all solution to their larger than life issues.

           Despite everything I said, the book was not bad. It wasn’t amazing, but it wasn’t bad. I found Penny’s roommate annoying (and roommate’s supposed bitchy best friend), how Penny handles her mother to be catastrophic, the “twist” at the end where Jude finds out that Uncle Sam was Penny’s secret crush all along was so convenient that I had anticipated it from chapter three.

           But I digress; I was supposed to speak about the positives. I definitely really enjoy slice of life dramas. This is no different with books. I love a good epic fantasy like everyone else but occasionally reading a book about an ordinary girl going through her first year of college is so relatable and real that is strikes something within me that fantasy sometimes doesn’t.

           So I enjoyed the realistic aspect of this book and the portrayals of families, shitty dormitories, and the awe of new college classes and amazing professors.

I did like the progression of Sam and Penny’s digital to real-life relationship and the inclusion of some very real issues like poverty, immigration, mental health, and the digital age culture. Also, as a bonus, some of Penny and Sam’s texts to each other were pretty hilarious.

           Overall, not a bad read. It’s nothing fantastic, three months later and I could barely remember what happened outside a select few events (which never bodes well for a book’s longevity or significance) but I enjoyed the grit and diversity of it and I look forward to better written YA novels in the future with the same care and cultivation of multi-ethnic and complex characters that Mary Choi crafted here.

 Recommendation: If you enjoy texting in your real life and your digital one or love Korean dramas and heavily desire an American fictional adaptation of one this might be your gold mine. Otherwise, leave the texting for the times you aren’t leafing through a page and want something a little more removed than an accidental Tinder chat session turned true love.

Score: 6/10