I read Emergency Contact

This week's novel is Emergency Contact, Contemporary YA by Mary H.K. Choi.

Penny starts college at UT Austin, eager to get away from her over-excited mom.  Sam is a baker at a coffee house, who is not handling his girlfriend dumping him, and is especially not handling it when she announces that she's pregnant.  When he has a panic attack on the street, Penny--an expert on panic attacks--helps him home.  She demands text updates about how he's doing, and calls herself his emergency contact.  They start a friendship via text that they both desperately need.

I read this one because it's set in Austin.  Not only do I love to see things that acknowledge Austin, but I'm writing a novel set in Austin and I like to see how other people do it.  I was pleased with the way it captured parts of the city.  Aside from name dropping sometimes, there are paragraphs that work to give a sense of the setting.  They're generally short and scattered chapters apart, and what I found interesting was that instead of relying on description, they dealt more with how the characters felt.

"That fateful morning she'd told him she wanted to go to the breakfast taco spot before work.  The not-that-good spot on Manor that charged extra for pico de gallo."

I don't know exactly which place they're talking about, but at the same time I do.  Choi gets it.  Some facts are wrong, showing the author's age and the part of town in which she grew up, but it was more accurate than not.

This brings me to the main aspect of the book that stood out for me.  The characters describe people they meet and places they go and food they eat in unflattering terms.  They're vivid and stick with you.  And at the same time, they tell so much about the POV characters who are describing them.  These characters find the worst in things, and you can tell that from the way they describe their tortilla chips.