I LOVED reading this book through Pablo's perspective. He's painfully relatable and very endearing. However, I did not care for Leanna. I thought she was incredibly immature and I felt annoyed when she was in the picture.

But overall, I enjoyed the book and I wish I had this post-grad for high school and college. It's a reminder that you don't have to have everything figured out. You're allowed to question, stumble, and take your time.

The book is nuanced, thoughtful, hilarious, and also heartbreaking. It's everything you feel as you enter adulthood.

I had the pleasure of reading and reviewing an ARC of Emergency Contact, which I adored, and so when I saw that Mary HK Choi had another book coming out, I requested it without even reading the synopsis! I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: I love YA books that follow University/collage aged characters!! It just really brings a new level of relatability while reading, at my age. Pablo is this amazingly realistic character who is just trying to figure out who he is. He dropped out after his first year of college, is working in a fancy deli, is screening calls from the student loans office, and he has no idea what his next move is. So many young adults today struggle with that question of: what do I want to be when I grow up? What should I take in school? Do I NEED to take more school? I really enjoyed reading Pablo tackle all these and more. Plus – the romance in this one gave Emergency Contact a run for its money in cuteness levels!
Leanna is the epitome of successful young celebrity stories. But staying in a different hotel every night and being stopped by strangers for pictures can honestly be kind of craptastic. I LOVED LOVED LOVED this meet cute! Leanna and Pablo meet in a snow storm in New York and try to keep their developing relationship a secret, but of course, the internet finds out and chaos ensues!
Permanent Record also features: diverse characters (Pablo is half Pakistani and half Korean, and Lee is Mexican, and a cast of diverse side characters), a look at diversity in main stream social media, complex family dynamics, the question of when fandom turns into obsession, the struggle of being vulnerable, growing up and self-discovery, and the most amazing sounding food!
I wish I had had this book when I was just leaving high school and entering college. It was just such a realistic look at that age/time and I totally suggest it to anyone looking for a genuine feeling slice of life contemporary that is equal parts sad and heartwarming! Loved it and will continue to read anything Choi writes.
PS – Seriously, have snacks on hand, this book will make you hungry!
PPS – to anyone who struggled with the changing POVs in Emergency Contact, we only read from Pablo’s perspective in this one.

This is a YA contemporary romance that follows Pablo and Lee. Pablo is a recent college drop out working the night shift at a Brooklyn bodega and Lee is... an international pop star. Lee gave me serious Ariana vibes. She is that famous.
Anyways, they have an adorbale meet cute during Pablo's shift and the rest is a whirlwind catastrophe.

I ended up giving this a 4 star. I really enjoyed my time reading it and I loved the supporting characters. Pablos friends, family and managers are all so well developed and feel like real people. Pablo himself was TOOOO relatable. Following him working after dropping out of college, trying to keep his head above water and falling in love hard and fast for the first time was stressful yet endearing.
While this is a romance, (and it had some seriously swoony scenes,) it was so much more than that. Pablo is in a transitional period of his life and as much as he pretends he is okay, hes not. The best part of the novel in my opinion was watching Pablo evolve as a character.
If you enjoyed Choi's absolutely add this to your TBR.

What I admire most about Choi is how she’s able to realistically capture the voice of a college-aged male.

Being in my 30s there were a few times I had to crack open the urban dictionary because I didn’t know some of the terminology. But the language did lend a hand to making it feel even more authentic.

Permanent Record differs from Choi’s previous novel Emergency Contact by only having the male POV. I know for a lot of people, one of the main highlights of Emergency Contact was having both Sam and Penny’s POVs. In Permanent Record we only get Pablo because it’s the right way to tell the story. We don’t need Lee’s POV. This is Pablo’s story.

I honestly think this book could make for one incredible teen drama movie. The story and struggles Pablo goes through felt relevant and genuine. I mean, of course, we don’t all get to date pop star icons, but Choi made Pablo incredibly relatable and easy to connect with.

The unfortunate downside to this book was that I wasn’t rooting for the romance at all. I wasn’t engaged with that aspect of the story. Seeing that it’s being marketed as such, I found it sadly lacking. It was just missing something.

Reader warning: have copious amounts of snacks on hand while reading. You will not stop feeling hungry with all of the meals and snacks mentioned throughout the book. Several times my stomach started grumbling because it all sounded so delicious.

Thank you Netgalley and Simon and Shuster Canada for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

I own Emergency Contact by Mary H.K.Choi and I keep putting it off. Contemporary and I usually just don't mix well. However, this novel had me intrigued by the synopsis so I decided to give it a go.

I feel silly now that I have finished this novel for putting off her other one. Permanent Record was so beautifully written and I just fell right into this story. I fell in love with the characters and wanted to be included in the friend group. This book touches on being a young adult and trying to find your place in the world. It also touches on being famous and the crap that comes with the lifestyle.

Pablo was an outstanding realistic character, he was failing at life because he didn't know what he wanted in life. Also because he never felt good enough to his parents. This is something I am sure a lot of people can relate with, as well as understand. Pablo was jealous of his friends as they moved on with their lives and got jobs/careers. He had to learn the hard way that he needed to work on himself, by being himself. Not being someone that everyone else wanted him to be. He needed to discover himself, at his own pace.

Lee was also very realistic. She was a singer that wanted to do acting instead. She didn't enjoy her career choice in the fact that she hated singing. She decided to start putting herself out there for acting roles. When she meets Pablo she leans on him for some reassurance as well as some love. As a celebrity who is always under a microscope it can get kind of lonely, so she fell right into how Pablo treated her. The problem I had with Lee was she seemed very narcissistic. She only cared about her career in my opinion, while she lead Pablo on. Now the ending kind of makes up for some of her shitty behaviour but I don't think it made up for it enough.

The friendship in this book goes above and beyond. No matter how bad Pablo started treating his friends they were still there for him. They wanted to see him succeed, and they wanted to be somewhat helpful. As much as they could anyways. When Tice rips into Pablo it was one of my favorite parts of the book. A friend calling someone out for their lifestyle and behaviour and telling them to basically smarten up. YAS!!!! I think that with how tight this friend group was, it is a friendship that anyone and everyone strives for and it was showcased perfectly.

My only issue with this book was the romance seemed very insta-lovey but it was one sided. Pablo seemed to fall in head first meanwhile Lee kept herself distant. I do understand why she did this, but it still rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed like Pablo was just another notch in her belt, she got to experience a realtionship with what she classifies a "Normie" but it still wasn't good enough for her.

All in all this book was amazing and I enjoyed it much more than I thought I would. I definitely will be picking up Emergency Contact now as well, because Marys writing is beautiful and very realistic. It is stuff that people actually go through and may need some guidance as well as something to relate to.

Second book by Choi I've had the pleasure to review through NetGalley, I've enjoyed both books. I requested this one as soon as I saw she had this available because I liked Emergency Contact so much. I loved Pablo's character and his struggles, we don't often read about people struggling so much with deciding what to do at that point in their life and the juxtaposition with Lee and his friends was really well done. The characters were all relatable and lovable, I had fun seeing all the situations and different locations Pab went. Not sure if the ARC is just not quite polished but there were a few bits that I had to read over and over because the story seemed incomplete or jumpy, as well the dialogue was sometimes hard to follow and I would like maybe dated chapters since the timeline wasn't consistent, but overall it was a great story so I overlooked all that.

hmmmmm....I have such mixed feelings about this. I really enjoyed the main character Pablo and his struggles and anxieties. I found them super intriguing and relatable to someone trying to figure out their life in this day and age. where things get mixed is the love interest...I really did not like her. first of all, I thought she was 16, or at the very least a slightly immature 18 year old, which I thought was kinda weird considering the MC is 19 turning 20. TURNS OUT THE LOVE INTEREST IS 22??? EXCUSE ME HOW??? she was also just a bitch. she was trying SO hard to not be conceited and to be down to earth, but she was trying so hard that it came across as annoying? I was literally rooting for them not to be together, they were SO toxic for each other it made me cringe. Ive come to realize that I hate the way this author writes female characters, as I felt the same way when I read her debut novel. It's like she tries so hard to make them 'quirky' and 'different' but they just come across as bitchy and surface level ??? so that somewhat hindered my enjoyment of this, but I did really like Pablo's character arc so... 3 stars it is!

I was so excited when I saw that Simon & Schuster Canada approved my NetGalley request to read an eARC of Permanent Record. I had read Mary H.K. Choi's debut new adult novel, Emergency Contact , and loved it, and Choi's very modern and youthful style completely. Permanent Record was no different - I devoured it voraciously, all the while hoping it would never end.

Some mild spoilers within the analysis below...

Permanent Record sounds, at surface level, like a completely cheesy, overdone trope: totally ordinary boy falls in love with an obscenely famous girl, they enter into a relationship, things get tricky because of her fame, they break up, and then get back together. Sounds like every teen movie ever, right? This is almost the exact storyline of Choi's novel, but there's way more to it than this.

Choi uses the bones of this tired trope to flesh out something a lot deeper. Fame is a big theme here, and the celebrity machine that America has invented. Lee (or Leanna Smart), a former child star from a Disney TV series turned pop icon, lives a completely fake life, with fake hair and fake boobs, and meetings and events endowed with fake importance. Clearly, she longs for something real, which is what she finds when she meets Pablo. Pablo Neruda Rind works the night shift at a bodega in NYC, and although it wasn't his intention, uses his relationship with Lee as an escape from an unhappy life.

Holding Pab up against Lee's life of excess lets us really examine the topic of money. Pablo is broke. Not just broke, but in debt. And every decision (some his fault, like the turntables he bought from a music store and never used, and some not his fault, like when he gets sick and has to go to the walk-in clinic and pay $400 for them to do x-rays and tell him there's nothing they can do to heal his flu) he makes about money causes him to go further in debt, which he deals with by ignoring it, and stuffing envelopes with PAST DUE stamped on them in a drawer in the tiny room in the apartment he shares with four other guys. Meanwhile, Lee tries to spend $4000 on a suit as a gift to Pab. Choi never preaches about the topic of money, but the juxtaposition of the 1% against a reality that will look familiar to many people makes a loud statement about what it's like to live in poverty (even a poverty created though sometimes stupid decisions), the endless cycle that it can create for ordinary people.

Another big theme in this novel is race. Pablo is not Latinx as his name might imply (he is named after Chilean poet Pablo Neruda). His mom, a doctor, is Korean, and his dad, a professor and playwright, is Pakistani. Pab's roommates represent various nationalities and ethnicities. There are many times race plays a quiet factor in this novel. Pab brings up occasions when his heritage is confusing to others, like when he visits Korea with Lee and nobody realizes he's Korean. His brown skin makes some minor characters assume he's hired help, rather than a guest. Lee's character, whose parents are Mexican, also reveals something about race when she talks about how her public persona is sanitized and made more palatable for white viewers. She's proud that her next album will be released in English and Spanish. As with the topic of money, Choi is never heavy handed when she talks about race, but it is an important and underlying consideration for every character in this book.

As with Emergency Contact, Choi's language, diction, and characters are undeniably millennial. One of the best things about this book is how perfectly right Choi got Pab's voice. He sounds, acts, and thinks exactly like a twenty-year-old college dropout living in Brooklyn. Even Pab's obsession with snack foods and sneakers (and his popular Instagram account that features a snack matched to a shoe) feels so incredibly current. But Choi also makes Pab's character emotional, introspective, and flawed. One of my favourite things in this book was Choi's rendering of Pab's family. Pab's mom works so hard, and has high expectations for her sons, reflecting something many kids of first generation immigrants will be able to recognize. Pab's dad is his mom's foil - emotional, artistic, and willing to take as many risks as he has to for the sake of creativity. Although they separated when Pab's brother Rain was a baby, they always parented their kids together. They definitely didn't do things perfectly, as the screw-ups that both Pab and Rain do fairly constantly can attest to, but it's so clear that their family is full of so much love. In fact, it's Pab's family that finally helps him realize what he needs to do to save his stalled life and move forward in a way that feels right to him.

Second novels, especially ones that come after debut books that many people loved, can sometimes fall short, but Permanent Record just solidified my fan status for Mary H.K. Choi. Sign me up for the next one!