What is author Mary H.K. Choi doing in a bodega? Surrounded by Swiffer refills, dry salami and a frozen case filled halfway with Haagen Dazs ice cream and plastic cups of ice, she’s walking through the aisles, right at home.
She runs her hands through the plastic flaps covering the cold drinks, and says, “I want a pressed coconut water,” perhaps in reference to a running joke featured in her second novel, “Permanent Record,” which hits shelves today.
In Choi’s YA book, the main character, Pablo Nerudo Rind, is a college dropout who works at a New York City bodega not unlike the place in which Choi is now standing. Scratch that — where he works is a fancy health food store-cum-bodega, not a true corner store like this one, which sells plungers and brooms next to barren shelves while a cat roams around.
Pablo, an antihero of sorts, is procrastinating about getting his life back on track after being kicked out of New York University, when an unlikely love interest — the megapop star Leanna Smart — walks into the bodega while he’s working. They strike up a romance and, in the process, Pablo goes through self-loathing, depression, anxiety
She runs her hands through the plastic flaps covering the cold drinks, and says, “I want a pressed coconut water,” perhaps in reference to a running joke featured in her second novel, “Permanent Record,” which hits shelves today.
In Choi’s YA book, the main character, Pablo Nerudo Rind, is a college dropout who works at a New York City bodega not unlike the place in which Choi is now standing. Scratch that — where he works is a fancy health food store-cum-bodega, not a true corner store like this one, which sells plungers and brooms next to barren shelves while a cat roams around.
Pablo, an antihero of sorts, is procrastinating about getting his life back on track after being kicked out of New York University, when an unlikely love interest — the megapop star Leanna Smart — walks into the bodega while he’s working. They strike up a romance and, in the process, Pablo goes through self-loathing, depression, anxiety