Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


It’s piles and piles of emotional homework forever if you ever want to qualify as a grown-up

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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Official book description: For Penny Lee, high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she’d somehow landed a boyfriend, they never managed to know much about each other. Now Penny is heading 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 […]

The situation gets rough then I start to panic.

Permanent Record by Mary H.K. Choi

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Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact is going on my list of favorite books of 2019, so there was no doubt I was going to read Permanent Record as soon as I could get my hands on it. Pablo Neruda Rind, the half Korean and half Pakistani son of a pair of poetry lovers, is in a rut. Since he dropped out of NYU after (during? unclear.) his freshman year, he works the nightshift in a fancy Brooklyn bodega and hangs out with his roommates. He […]

“Finally, if you’re wondering if it counts and it feels like it counts, it counts.” (CBR11 Bingo)

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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When Rainbow Rowell says a book is her favorite of the year, I am going to add it to my to-read list and am likely to track it down relatively quickly. In the case of Mary H.K. Choi’s Emergency Contact it fitting into a Bingo Square category (Youths!) made it all the better. Let’s get the big verdict out of the way early: this debut is very good and Choi does the thing that I like best about Rowell’s work, she builds imperfect and entirely […]

Angsty, charming, good….and problematic?

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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CBR11 Bingo –  Cannonballer Says So, scootsa1000 reviewed this book two months ago, and she could’ve just said, “Hey, Rainbow Rowell says this is the best book she read last year.” That would’ve been enough to get me to read Emergency Contact. Instead, she went on to give a really good review of the book. I suggest reading it. Penny is a freshman in college, and I don’t think she’s ever looked forward to anything in her life as much as she has getting away […]

Never doubt Rainbow.

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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A few weeks ago, while sitting around and browsing Instagram instead of doing whatever I was supposed to be doing, I saw a post from Rainbow Rowell talking about a book coming out soon from an author that she loves, and mentioned Emergency Contact. I hadn’t heard of it before, and Rainbow claimed was  her favorite book of 2018! Rainbow went on and on, talking about how excited she was for the new book and how much she loved EC, and I just said WHAT […]



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