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A review by snaillydia
Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi
2.0
So a book with a cute blurb and a beautiful cover that's been promoted all over my Instagram feed, and yet has a ton of mixed reviews on Goodreads... What could go wrong?
A lot of things went wrong.
The writing was strange. The vocabulary and tone used were ones that suited an English-major, with pseudo-intellectual references to old novels and complicated, obscure words. And every character spoke like that, even the ones that clearly weren't like that. It was weird and irritating.
I'm tired of this trope where the child of a single parent gets so mean to their parents when they decide to move on. Not only is it a little unrealistic when it comes from a 17-18 year-old, it makes the character unlikable on default. This is the reason I started to dislike Penny immediately.
Calling out everything as racist was another characteristic of hers that I found irritating. She can make all kinds of jokes about people of other cultures (as long as they were white), but the smallest comment about her race was met with her being defensive. She threw the word racist around very, very easily.
I had a problem with all the racial things that were discussed in this novel. It's not only the fact that I disagree with the opinions that the characters expressed, it was that it was shoved down the throat of the reader, while being very out of place. The author didn't have anything new to add to the conversation but she just had to join it anyway.
Meanwhile, Sam was a breath of fresh air. A passionate kid with a hunger to create, in a very unfortunate place financially, but still polite and good. Even if I didn't love him, he had an interesting story to tell, that contrasted Penny's blandness.
The romance didn't really work for me. It feels like these characters became friends off-screen overnight, so it was difficult to care much about the relationship. We didn't see many of their interactions in the first half of the novel. This just made me feel very disconnected from the whole thing.
The worst thing about the novel, perhaps, is that there is no real plot. Things happen to these characters, and they also do things, but there was no series of events in this book I could call The Plot. This made it so the novel had no real point or essence to it. Like it's just the author self-inserting and expressing her random thoughts for 400 pages. That's why every comparison of this book to a Rainbow Rowell novel makes me roll my eyes.
Overall, while I didn't hate this as much as Leah On The Off-Beat, it lacked those scarce moments of sweetness that book had, so I'm giving it the same rating as that. This was such a nothing novel. I feel like I wasted my time.
A minor complaint: the font on the ebook is particularly difficult to read. I used the settings to change the font, but that messed up the way characters' texts were shown and it was hard to follow.
A lot of things went wrong.
The writing was strange. The vocabulary and tone used were ones that suited an English-major, with pseudo-intellectual references to old novels and complicated, obscure words. And every character spoke like that, even the ones that clearly weren't like that. It was weird and irritating.
I'm tired of this trope where the child of a single parent gets so mean to their parents when they decide to move on. Not only is it a little unrealistic when it comes from a 17-18 year-old, it makes the character unlikable on default. This is the reason I started to dislike Penny immediately.
Calling out everything as racist was another characteristic of hers that I found irritating. She can make all kinds of jokes about people of other cultures (as long as they were white), but the smallest comment about her race was met with her being defensive. She threw the word racist around very, very easily.
I had a problem with all the racial things that were discussed in this novel. It's not only the fact that I disagree with the opinions that the characters expressed, it was that it was shoved down the throat of the reader, while being very out of place. The author didn't have anything new to add to the conversation but she just had to join it anyway.
Meanwhile, Sam was a breath of fresh air. A passionate kid with a hunger to create, in a very unfortunate place financially, but still polite and good. Even if I didn't love him, he had an interesting story to tell, that contrasted Penny's blandness.
The romance didn't really work for me. It feels like these characters became friends off-screen overnight, so it was difficult to care much about the relationship. We didn't see many of their interactions in the first half of the novel. This just made me feel very disconnected from the whole thing.
The worst thing about the novel, perhaps, is that there is no real plot. Things happen to these characters, and they also do things, but there was no series of events in this book I could call The Plot. This made it so the novel had no real point or essence to it. Like it's just the author self-inserting and expressing her random thoughts for 400 pages. That's why every comparison of this book to a Rainbow Rowell novel makes me roll my eyes.
Overall, while I didn't hate this as much as Leah On The Off-Beat, it lacked those scarce moments of sweetness that book had, so I'm giving it the same rating as that. This was such a nothing novel. I feel like I wasted my time.
A minor complaint: the font on the ebook is particularly difficult to read. I used the settings to change the font, but that messed up the way characters' texts were shown and it was hard to follow.