Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


Join the CBR18 Book Bingo Reading Challenge—Now Underway!   

Emergency Contact doesn’t quite make the contact with me I’d hoped for

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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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 […]

Feels how the cover looks

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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I’m noting that a frustrating thing about audiobooks is I can’t highlight passages. Realizing that Goodreads preserves my highlights beyond the term of a library loan has been revolutionary for me so I really feel that it’s missing in an audiobook. Ah well. For this book, though, I find it’s rare that a cover matches its book so well. There’s something about the soft pink cover and simple line illustration style, the way Penny and Sam are drawn in such close proximity but the lack of […]

Running Way Behind on Bingo

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi

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CBR12 Bingo: Uncannon (Becoming) and Reader’s Choice as a replacement for Yellow (Emergency Contact) Who knows? If I get around to finishing the book I have on the song “Hallelujah,” I might actually finish a Bingo line. Anyway, on to the reviews. I read these books long enough ago that I have forgotten a lot about them and what my thoughts were about them, but I’ll try my best. Atthough, when it comes to Becoming, I’m sure plenty of other reviewers have said it better. […]

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 […]



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