Between going to Disney for a week and changing jobs, it’s been a busy time for me and not much reading has gotten done. But now’s time to get back down to it, starting with Emergency Contact. This was on my to-read list for a while, so when I found it at a clearance price at Books a Million, I couldn’t resist.
Emergency Contact is about two characters, Penny and Sam, who’ve gotten some shit deals in their lives and who find one another amidst it all. There’s not much else to it than that, honestly. We see their unlikely friendship grow bit by bit until the possibility of it becoming more enters into the equation. There’s sprinkles of drama here and there, like Penny’s love/hate relationship with her mother, Sam’s hang-ups with his own mother, or Sam’s almost mythic ex-girlfriend coming back into the picture in surprising fashion; however, they’re background noise to the main plot of Penny and Sam.
There’s not a ton of depth to the story, and you can pretty easily guess early on how things are going to turn out. That’s not to say seeing Penny and Sam warm to one another, and seeing them be their weird, flawed selves, wasn’t enough to keep me turning the page. I read it in a flash for a reason. My nitpick is I wanted more to hook me into the story. Some more meat on the bone. I wanted the characters to feel a little less like set dressing for their story, and to delve more into their and Penny and Sam’s lives.
Emergency Contact ends rather abruptly, instead, taking the pot off the burner and tipping the water out instead of allowing for it to slowly simmer down and wrap things up more neatly. It was fun while it lasted, but that’s about all it was: empty fun that I’m sure I’ll forget about before long. Set your expectations accordingly and I’m sure you’ll enjoy it, though.
