Emergency Contact
Author: Mary H.K Choi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Australia
Release date: January 1st 2019
Pages: 391 pages
R.R.P: $17.99
For Penny Lee high school has a total non-event. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she'd somehow landed a boyfriend, they never managed to know much about each other. Now Penny is heading 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 cafe 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 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 a 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, you know, see each other.
My Review
Thoughts on the book: Told from the Point of Views of Penny Lee and Sam, Emergency Contact is the debut novel from Mary H.K. Choi about young love in this modern day. Penny Lee finally has the chance to make a life for herself away from her mother, who she feels holds her back and treats her more like a best friend then her child, as she heads of to college in Texas to become a writer. Being a bit of an introvert her new roommate is so far from where Penny is that she wonders if they will actually get along. Sam is the resident baker and worker at House, a coffee house where he also happens to live in a room above it. Sam has had a pretty tough time growing up his mother basically gave up on him and drank her life away, he's just making ends meet and now Sam's ex girlfriend, who happens to be an Instagram star, has just come back into his life to tell him that the one night stand they had awhile ago may have been more than a good time, her period is late and if she's pregnant it is his. Sam and Penny meet when her new roommate Jude and her friend Mallory take her out to coffee where her 'uncle' Sam works and warns both Penny and Mallory that they never hook up with Sam. But when Penny finds Sam basically passed out in the middle of the street she takes charge and attempts to get Sam some help. Finding out he has no Emergency Contact, Penny decides to put her number in his phone under Penny Emergency and Sam's is saved under Sam House. Suddenly they are both texting back and forth and are having to hide their relationship from her roommate and his 'niece' Jude. But texting is easy but will meeting in person come with the same easiness? And more importantly will all the friendships that have thus far been created be able to survive when everything comes out?
A massive thank you to Simon and Schuster Australia and AusYaBloggers for allowing me to be apart of the amazing blog tour for the release of Mary H.K Choi's debut novel, Emergency Contact in Australia. I feel so lucky to be apart of such an amazing group of bloggers who are able to share their views on this amazing book, Emergency Contact. I hadn't heard too much about Emergency Contact besides seeing a post that Jeann from Happy Indulgence had made awhile ago about how she had red the book and what her thoughts were on it when she'd read it awhile before this opportunity came up. So when we were offered the chance to be apart of this blog tour I immediately jumped at the chance.
I started off with great earnest but I had to back away for a bit quite early on because I just wasn't in the mood to read it at the time. I found I was really struggling with it and that I was putting it down more and more and finding other things to do. So by reading a different book that was an old favourite I jumped back into Emergency Conact and I then couldn't put it down. I adored the slow burn relationship that happened between Sam and Penny through their text messages and phone calls and the fact that they both seemed to live very different lives despite falling in love. Penny was going through the normal college experiences that most college students face and Sam was dealing with his own life with his ex maybe being pregnant and making his video presentation for his course. We got two different storylines and the text messages from the two joining them both together so it was basically one world and both Sam and Penny are unique characters that hold you captive until the end. My favourite part though was the will Jude find out that they are talking or won't she and if she does how will she react? It turned out perfectly I thought and really couldn't have asked for a better ending to the book. I'm glad I continued reading Emergency Contact and gave it another go after struggling to start with.
Rating: 4/5
Author bio + links
Twitter: @ChoitotheWorld
Instagram: @ChoitotheWorld
Website: http://www.choitotheworld.com/
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.
Tour schedule
https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/c/EmergencyContactBlogTour
Purchase links
Amazon - https://amzn.to/2QlXxlI
Dymocks - https://bit.ly/2PXAcY3
QBD - https://bit.ly/2DXqui1
Readings - https://bit.ly/2Aojnv1
Kindle - https://amzn.to/2SiaRVL
iBooks - https://apple.co/
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