Author Spotlight: Emergency Contact by Mary H. K. Choi

Mary H.K. Choi is a writer for The New York Times, GQ, Wired, and The Atlantic. She has written comics for Marvel and DC, as well as a collection of essays called Oh, Never Mind. She is the host of Hey, Cool Job!, a podcast about jobs, and is a culture correspondent for VICE News Tonight on HBO. Emergency Contact is her first novel. Mary grew up in Hong Kong and Texas and now lives in New York. Follow her on Twitter at @ChoitotheWorld.

Title: Emergency Contact

Genre: Young Adult Contemporary - College Age

Author: Mary H. K. Choi

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Publication: March 27th 2018

Cover Rating: 5/5

Reading format: Provided ARC

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Emergency Contact by Mary H. K. Choi is an awkward coming of age/romance story about two people who meet, exchange numbers and express themselves via text message. This book is a wonderful Young Adult contemporary novel that follows the two college-age characters. We do not have enough college-age Young Adult books and this is an excellent addition to the very small collection that does exist.

Penny is a very eccentric character. She has a lot of quirks and I think the best way I can describe her is like a storm cloud. She also has a very unique way of communicating with others. Instead of starting a story or conversation from the start she begins from another point and expects people to follow her train of thought. Not many people speak, what her mother calls, "Penny" but when she meets Sam, he ends up speaking fluent "Penny" and that starts the beginning of a very dependent friendship. 

Sam is kind of like Penny but a little bit darker and a little bit older. He works at a coffee shop/bakery and he makes some excellent food. He has some not so great things going on in his life and everything just builds up to the point where he has a very public anxiety episode. Lucky for him, Penny was there at the same time and she pretty much saved him and thusly, became his Emergency Contact. 

Now, emergency contact in this sense isn't what most people think. Their relationship was basically texting back and forth when things got too stressful or to just talk about something on their minds. They helped each other out and it was a pretty cool situation. I thought it would end up getting a bit too dependent and then it would end badly but that author wrote everything in a way to where it turned out wonderfully for both character.

Both characters had some issues with their mothers. Both issues were on entirely different spectrums but they were still problems for each character. With Penny, she blamed her mother for a very traumatic event that happened to her. With Sam, his mother was just a very bad person and he will spend a good bit of his life recovering, mentally and financially, from what she did to him.

In the end, Emergency Contact will teach you something. And that something is, everyone has problems/baggage. It's how many of those things you share about yourself with a person that allows you to get close to someone. It might feel embarrassing letting someone see you so exposed but it could lead to something extremely beautiful; like it did with this book. I am also glad Penny sort of worked things out with her whole mom situation. 

Overall, I gave the book 4.5/5 stars.