Review| Emergency Contacy

  Emergency Contact

AUTHOR:  Mary H.K. Choi
SERIES: Standalone 
PAGES:394
PUBLISHER:  Simon & Schuster
RELEASE DATE:  March 27th,2018

SUMMARY:

For Penny Lee high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.

Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.

When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.

Meet Penny Lee your normal not-so-normal teenager. Penny Lee has spent her entire high school career living with the motto of work hard, have fun later. She has essentially avoided making friends her entire high school career besides her one and only boyfriend Mark. Mark hardly knows anything about Penny, but Penny doesn't seem to mind. That is until Penny meets Sam. Sam has a dream, a big one at that, to become a director. However, life just keeps kicking Sam when he's down. As Sam's trying to figure out the current ins and outs of his day-to-day struggles, he is caught with his pants down when he starts to have a panic attack in the middle of the street. With no one coming to his rescue, Penny jumps in to help Sam out. From there on out, Sam and Penny agree to be each other's emergency contact.  While they exchange their deepest darkest fears and secrets, things start to heat up. Can they stay friends or is there something more between them? 

I picked this one up when I was at Barnes and Noble the other day because I was immediately drawn to the beautiful cover of this book. I loved all the pinks and gold tones this book had.  After reading the back, I knew I had to have it and I knew this one would be a nail-biter!  Going into this one with high expectations was probably setting the bar a little too high, however. As I begin to read I notice there was a huge disconnect between me and the writing style of this book.  There was so much background information being thrown to me in the early stages of the book and it just kept coming and coming the further I got into the book. I do think this made the overall first half of the book really hard of a read as the overall pace was get so slow. Nevertheless, I did still finish this book in under 24 hours with a little bit of perseverance because I still had such high hopes for the overall concept of the story. With that being siad, this book definitely had some highs and lows. 

The characters in this story truly made this book come to life. I think I had read about a dozen of other reviews on this book before I decided to give it ago, and it seems that that was the central theme of most of them as well.  I absolutely loved that Penny wasn't your typical American teenage girl nor was she your typical Korean girl. She was the true definition of what blended cultures look like and how they should be betrayed in writing. I also really liked that typical Korean cliches weren't used in an over-the-top manner. Not that I don't love a good Kdrama because I for sure do, but I think in this novel it would have just been one too many cherries to the top. Penny was such a strong and focused character I mean she focused so much on getting to the point where she was in life at that moment, that she had not taken the time to really get to know herself or understand the basic structure of friendships. Sam was of course our eye candy and I really loved him for also not being super cliche, but I've got to say my favorite character by FAR was Jude.  Needless to say, I really wish we got to see more of Jude as she was kind of labeled by Sam as an annoyed character he wanted to avoid. 

Overall, I think that this was a super fun light read. I do overall wish that with all of the extra information we were given at the beginning it somehow contributed to a side story or something of that nature. It kind of felt flat at the end because a lot of things were left with no clear resolution. For example, Jude never spoke to Penny again. We just can assume that based off of her conversation with Sam, she and Penny were going to make up, but we never got the satisfaction of that moment where they truly reconciled. Another huge scene that I would have loved to see is Mallory coming back in after all the dust settled and making a salty comment about how Penny had scored the guy she ultimately wanted. For this reason, I just think there was SOO much potential that was unfortunately missed opportunities with the overall plotline. 

In the end, all is well it ends well, if you like a good contemporary novel with a twist of today's modern society then this one is for you! It has sweet and adorable banter back and forth between Penny and Sam and there is an amazing journey you take with connecting with each and every character throughout this novel.