Emergency Contact by Mary H K Choi 🔖🔖🔖🔖

First published March 27, 2018

__________

Literary Awards: Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Young Adult Fiction 2018 

__________

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. (source: goodreads)

__________

I enjoyed this book. I liked that the main relationship was not based on attractiveness, though that played into the story line, but more about emotional support and connection. I enjoyed the quirks of Penny and how people interacted with those, noticed those, and made accommodations for them. It was refreshing that not all the difficult relationships had rosy closure, and those that did find "repair" was not neat and tidy, but emotional and expressed hurt and actual open communication. This just felt real and good to me.

__________

This one is banned in my kid's school district. It is not even available at my local public library. 

Banned for sexual activities; sexual nudity; drug and alcohol use; profanity; and controversial racial commentary; and hate involving racism.

My take:  Sexual activities. sexual nudity. 

• There were descriptions of making out, one of which ended in sexual assault and the other where the man showed respect for the woman's stiffening when touched under her shirt, and he stopped. 
• Penny's mother is referred to as a MILF. 
• A boyfriend sent a character "nudes"
• Discussion of Penny wanting to have sex but having qualms about her boyfriend. Describes "getting naked with some fumbling third-base action." 
• A male glances at a woman's "boobs".  
• Friends talked about their parents and grandparents having sex. "Penny tried to imagine sex between seventy-year-olds".  
• A friend announced she is drinking a lot of cranberry juice as she has a UTI "because of the sheer volume of sex I had this past week." 
• A young woman, referring to a handsome barista, said, "Because I would bang the ever-living shit out of him if he'd give me the time of day." 
• References to birth control, periods, condoms. 
• Abortion is discussed, but dismissed as an option, during a pregnancy scare. 

Drug and alcohol use. 

• Some characters smoke weed, one parental figure eats weed brownies with negative results, a young man chose alcohol to cope with loss and discusses his regrets. 
• Main character drinks a lot at a party. 

Profanity. 

• There are over 50 s-words. Other than that, the other words are less than 5, other than b-word which is 5. F-word 4 times. 

Controversial racial commentary. Hate involving racism. 

• The Korean main character described why her mother is still beautiful and young looking by saying "Asian don't raisin". 
• Character wants to order a baked good received a response "Yeah, your people love it." "My people?" "She means white," said Bastian. 
• Main character, who is Korean, laments about how she has been treated at times due to her ethnicity. 
• Again, as stated many times, I do not believe the fact that people of color point out the mistreatment they receive as "controversial racial commentary". It's facts.
• And there was no "hate" involving racism that I recall in this book. 

Would I be okay with kid reading this? Sure, as a teen. Younger than 13, I imagine it wouldn't even interest him that much.