The concept behind Emergency Contact is pretty cute: Sam and Penny meet at a coffee shop and after Sam has a bad night and Penny is the one who gets him home safely, they agree to be each other’s ’emergency contact,’ the person the other can text for help at any time. Over time, their texts become less about actual emergencies and more about flirting through emojis. The book isn’t a romcom, however, and Sam and Penny end up helping each other through some difficult times.

Mostly, Emergency Contact made me feel old. There was a time I may have been totally caught up in Sam and Penny’s drama, and may very well have found this a very deep and emotionally moving tale of friendship and love. As it was, I was mostly unmoved.

Part of it is that both characters felt quirky hipsterish in a way that reminded me of so many other main characters in teen dramas. Penny is an aspiring fiction writer who studies English at university. Sam is an aspiring documentary filmmaker who works at a coffee shop to make ends meet and doesn’t even have enough money to buy a laptop for making his films. Penny’s main project is a short story inspired by a news item from Korea, and a breakthrough about the perspective that tells the story elevates her work to brilliance in her teacher’s eyes. It was a good idea, and certainly unusual, but I thought the story ended up feeling pretty flat. Sam’s main project is a documentary about neighbourhood kids, which isn’t super groundbreaking in terms of documentary ideas, though I do like a decision he made about how best to respect the best interests of his subjects.

A lot of Penny’s problems also had to do with her mother. I liked the cultural aspect of it, where Penny’s non-Korean roommate complains that Penny’s mother is too involved in her life considering she’s now in university, and Penny explains that that’s just how their relationship is. I thought that felt very realistic, and I thought the roommate’s reaction was also very true-to-life. But overall, I felt bad for Penny’s mother, with Penny being so judgemental of her romantic life and her love for trendy, youthful clothes. I can understand where Penny is coming from, and perhaps if I had read this when I was Penny’s age, I may have even sympathized, but as it is, I felt sorrier for the mother.

Still, the story got better the further it developed, and I especially liked how the friendship between Sam and Penny evolved over time. I think younger readers or at least more angsty or less jaded ones, may enjoy this book more than I did, but this simply wasn’t for me. One thing I did absolutely love is the cover art: the illustrations and cover design are gorgeous!

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Thank you to Simon and Schuster Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The Singkil is a Filipino dance that tells the story of a Muslim Filipina princess who gets through a forest safely while the gods send a terrible earthquake to trip her up. It’s danced with fans and bamboo poles, and is an expression of grace delicately balanced within danger, as the dancers must step nimbly between moving bamboo poles that could trip them up or crush their ankles with a single mistake.

Catherine Hernandez’s play Singkil is a highly symbolic and evocative expression of this dance. It tells the story of Mimi Perez, a Filipino-Canadian woman coming to terms with her mother’s death. Her mother Maria used to dance the Singkil, but then gave up her dancing when she and her husband Nestor moved to Canada to build a new life for their family. Mimi has never learned the dance but somewhat auspiciously discovers her mother’s Singkil headdress in her apartment.

The play moves back and forth in time, showing Mimi dealing with boyfriend troubles and the complex emotions dredged up by her mother’s childhood friend and fellow dancer Norma coming for a visit, then flashing back to Maria and Nestor’s life in Manila and in their first few years in Canada. It’s a complex story, and Hernandez includes a lot of choreography stage directions that sound beautiful and evocative.

It sounds like a beautiful play and I think it’ll be incredible on stage, but it doesn’t quite translate as well onto the page. The fluidity of the time periods and shifting character roles felt confusing to read about, and the parts about the voices Mimi hears and the choreography the characters go through lose some of their power in book format. Still, I love the photos of the production included in the book, and I’d love to see the play — and the Singkil dance! — performed onstage.

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Thank you to Playwrights Canada Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

OMG how much do I love this book?! Jojo Moyes has just taken me on an intense emotional roller coaster. Louisa Clark is as wonderful as always and if this gets turned into a movie, Emilia Clarke will be just perfect in it. In Still Me, Louisa Clark moves to New York to care for the much younger second wife of a wealthy businessman and gets drawn into their family and society drama. She is also dealing with the challenges of her long distance relationship with Sam, who has just been assigned a beautiful young partner at work, and then meets an American who looks unnervingly like Will Traynor. 

There are so many reasons this book was such fun to read, but mostly, it was the characters. What an incredible cast! I loved the glitzy glamorous world of the Gopniks, which started out hilarious then revealed itself to be much more complex than first glance.

I absolutely ADORED Mrs DeWitt and her beloved dog Dean Martin, and that was just the most heartwarming, heartbreaking part of the book. One scene near the end involving these characters made me ugly cry, and I just wanted to hug them all.
Nathan is awesome as always, and I’m so glad Louisa got to work with him again. I also love new characters Ashok and Meena, and their fight to save the community library. There’s also a great scene where Louisa sees Ashok in civilian clothes for the first time (he’s usually in his doorman uniform). She realizes how work uniforms can render you invisible, and wonders if their wealthy employers would notice them more if they weren’t wearing uniforms.

I also loved the bits about Louisa’s family, particularly about Treena’s new relationship and how much happier and more content she now is.

I also loved the storyline about Louisa’s relationship with Sam. There are some hilarious bits (food poisoning) and serious conversations about the challenges of maintaining a long-distance relationship. I also loved the way Moyes treated grand romantic gestures in this book. It started as a silly and fun concept that Sam did at an airport mostly to humour Louisa in the beginning of the story, then as their relationship progressed, he understood a bit better about the significance of such gestures. In a heartbreaking series of emails, he confesses he was never the type to do grand romance, and asked Louisa if that’s what she wanted and she responded that she never wanted anything grand from him at all. And finally, I won’t spoil the outcome of the final grand romantic gesture in the book, but I will say that while I scoffed at the idea at first, I was completely, at-the-edge-of-my-seat riveted during those final scenes. It was beautifully written and I was hooked throughout.

Most of all, I loved how Louisa really grew into herself in this book. She has always kicked ass, but here, with the help of Mrs. DeWitt, she comes to the understanding that she’s great at caring for others, but she can’t live for others, nor can she structure her life to suit others’ adventures. I love how her story turns out, and I can just imagine a vintage Devil Wears Prada type Book 4.

Still Me is of my two favourite books of 2018 so far (the other being The Wolf by Nate Blakeslee). I just wanted to keep losing myself in this story, and even when I had to stop reading for real-life stuff, I was excited by the thought that this book would be waiting for me on my next break or when I got home.

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Thank you to Goodreads and Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.