Emergency Contact (2018), the debut novel by Mary H. K. Choi, is a book I judged by its beautiful cover: a soft pink backdrop, a female and male in near fetal position, back to back, staring into their cell phone in perfect contrast along with a cursive title in gold superimposed at center over both characters. The cover is perfect in balance and harmony--unfortunately, the story is not.Snarky, angst-filled, anti-social Penny Lee is a freshman with mommy issues at the University of Texas. On a forced excursion out with her roommate to a local coffee shop, she meets Sam, who works there. Penny immediately falls for him. Sam, homeless and slightly older, has in own serious life problems to get through, so Penny isn't immediately on his radar. After a disorienting experience for both, they exchange numbers and become each other's "emergency contact," a person to talk to in moments of crisis, and develop their relationship over text messages. In the end, they get together. Told in alternating points of view, Sam is the only character who comes close to being developed.
At 400 pages, Emergency Contact reads like fan-fiction: there are lots of words--things said and done by the characters, some of which seem meaningless to the whole--with minimal pay off because there's no real development of plot, conflict, or character. In fact, there's no plot. Frankly, it is a book I was shocked I could find in actual bookstores, for I read the e-book version and thought it was a self-published work on Amazon.
Marketed as a romantic comedy for teens, Emergency Contact is short on the comedy but has romance. I guess.
And a beautiful cover.
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