Last year for book club we read Mary H.K. Choi's EMERGENCY CONTACT and some of us suburban moms were disappointed by The Youth and others, like me, admitted to being charmed by the young adult characters who forge a relationship mostly via text. I love novels as reflections—you might even say time capsules—of the world around us. I think Choi has an immense talent for capturing what it's like to be young today, and that is really always a complicated thing. And today's world, rooted in so much self-identifying, can be especially complex to navigate as a conscientious writer who wants to do right by everyone.

In PERMANENT RECORD, our hero is Pablo Neruda Rind (yup), a Pakistani-Korean-American who works at a bodega, grew up in Brooklyn, and worries about the cost of college but remains largely ambivalent about next steps. In the wee hours of the morning, a disheveled, beautiful popstar walks into the bodega and permanently changes the trajectory of his life. Or does she? The thing about PERMANENT RECORD is that the romance, for me, was the least interesting part. I'd hesitate to even call this a romance; I don't normally use the term 'coming-of-age,' but I'll use it here for expediency. The best parts are Pablo shining as a snack connisseur (the snack descriptions are A+), interacting with each of his family members (the heartstrings were pulled), and my own gob-smacking realizations about the entire book as I turned the final page expecting there to be more. I looked for a predictable ending, but Choi subverted that payoff.

I love Choi a lot, and look forward to more of her novels.