Hello and happy Monday. As I told you yesterday, today is a holiday, and last night (or really, early this morning) I fell asleep at like 1 am, partly because I wanted to finish the book I’m reviewing in this post, but also because, you know, anxiety. So yeah, I binge-read Emergency Contact by H.K. Choi and today I’m sharing my thoughts on it.

I knew this was a controversial book even before I started reading it, since it was blurbed by Rainbow Rowell, and honestly, considering that H.K Choi is Asian American and Rainbow Rowell is infamous for misrepresenting Asian American characters, I thought it was a very odd choice, and not particularly a good omen.

I can’t speak for how well the characters of Asian descent were represented, but I can tell you that the author has something against Jewish people…there were three comments about neo nazis and swastikas, like the Holocaust was something funny. The character to whom the comment was made bakes hamantaschen in another scene, which, as far as I know, are made for Purim (a Jewish holiday), but the person was making them in November, so for me it made no sense. Besides the timing thing, it was odd that out of every pastry in the world, the author made the character bake something Ashkenazi Jews consume during a religious festivity, no? And also, let’s say they were an Ashkenazi Jew (as am I, btw), which is why they knew how to bake hamantaschen even if it wasn’t Purim, wouldn’t they have said something in response to the “joke” about decorating their room with a swastika? I’m sure I would have said something, but I don’t know…it might be my own paranoia as a Jew.

Another issue that I had with the book was that both main characters, at one point or another, are in romantic relationships in which one of the people involved is a minor and the other one isn’t, and there are implications, at least in one of the relationships, that the couple has sex. Now, I don’t know much about American law (I don’t even know a lot about Colombian law, and there are many lawyers in my family), but sex between a minor and an adult is statutory rape. And, I mean, was it really necessary to have not one but two of these relationships? That added nothing to the plot, really. Have both characters be consenting adults, even if you want to keep the age gap. There is also a rape scene, so be mindful of that before reading this book, but I honestly wouldn’t even consider reading it.

There is not much to say about the plot of the novel itself, since it is mostly character-driven, and what let me to read it nonstop were the conversations via text that Penny and Sam start having. I don’t think I would recommend this book; I think it is important that own-voices stories exist, but that doesn’t excuse them from writing problematic plots.