Series: -
There were many reasons as to why I absolutely wanted to pick up this book: 1) It has the prettiest cover, and it's also pink! 2) The main male character works in a café. I find books with characters who bake or work in bakeries to be very cute. 3) The two main characters are awkward people and they prefer communicating through text messages. Definitely my kind of people! 4) A lot of my bookstagram friends recommended this book to me, and they rated this book with 5 stars.
I wanted so badly to love this book, yet unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations.
I loved the interactions between the two characters, Penny and Sam. As someone who is more comfortable with communicating through text messages, Penny and Sam's interactions are so adorable and funny. They connected so well and it was obvious that they were perfect for each other. Here's an excerpt from the book that I wholly agree with, in regards to communicating through text messages:
“It wasn't a romance; it was too perfect for that. With texts there were only the words and none of the awkwardness. They could get to know each other completely and get comfortable before they had to do anything unnecessarily overwhelming like look at each other's eyeballs with their eyeballs.” ― Mary H.K. Choi, Emergency Contact
But despite rooting for their relationship, I find that I don't really love the characters as their own person. Penny is strong and independent, she can also be a fun person to talk with if you're able to connect with her, but I felt like there was nothing special about her to make me love her character wholly. And while I think Sam is cute, he too, didn't have that unique spark that could make me love him more. This is mostly just my own preference, and I should clarify that there weren't any major flaws in both of them. I don't hate any of them, I just couldn't like them enough.
This book is a rather light read, but it also touched heavier subjects such as anxiety, obsession and sexual assault (it was not graphic and was only mentioned briefly, but if you're uncomfortable reading anything related to sexual assaults, please proceed with care). I believe that I'm not knowledgeable enough in regards of anxiety, so I couldn't say much about this matter, but I personally think it's written well in the story. The obsession part was something that Sam went through, and I'm glad that he managed to overcome it. As for the sexual assault part though, which happened to Penny, I felt that it was dropped too sudden into the story. In no means am I demeaning the struggles of rape victims, because I know it's difficult for rape victims to open up about it. And I am glad that Penny didn't allow it to bring herself down, and she found the courage to talk about it with Sam, but I still felt like it was placed into the story out of nowhere.
Overall, Emergency Contact is a relatively nice read, with adorable text messages in between. Although Penny and Sam were each other's emergency contacts, there weren't really much "emergency" situations in the book as I had imagined. I probably placed too much expectations on this book, and sadly I didn't end up loving it as much as I had hoped to.
Special thanks to Rae for buddy-reading this with me! You can read her review on this book here.
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