Introducing Pool House

Mary H.K. Choi’s debut novel, 2018’s Emergency Contact, opens with the particular and unrelenting embarrassment of a teen girl whose mother happens to be a MILF. Choi’s protagonist, Penny Lee, is just four days from heading off to college and is at the Apple store with her mom, picking up a promised new phone, when disaster strikes. Penny’s mom, Celeste, gets chatted up by the father of one of Penny’s high school nemeses, the very rich and very mean Madison Chandler. (And we do love nemeses around here.) While Penny tries her best to grab her phone and her mom and get them both out of the store, Madison uses the opportunity not only to call Penny’s mom a slut, but to lace her vitriol with a racist trope that is both hateful and woefully incorrect:“Seriously, what’s with your mom’s geisha whore outfit?”…First off, geishas weren’t prostitutes. Common mistake. Typically made by the willfully ignorant and intellectually incurious. Some geishas beguiled their clients with dance and artful…