Emergency Contact

Read for an upcoming book club. This was very, very contemporary and I would think that a great many of these slang/pop culture references will be dated quickly. That said, I LOVE novels in which characters are not from rich backgrounds, or even middle class backgrounds. More fiction about people putting themselves through college by working hard, please!
Here is my overall problem: there is a lot of telling and not much showing going on here. I feel like everyone is some sort of “type” and acts only within the confines of their “type”. At times, the characters felt like SIMS. Now Penny is doing this. Now Sam is doing that. Sometimes a BIG idea is brought up, but not fully explored. Just one example, in Penny's class, a professor brings up #ourownvoices and it just doesn't actually go anywhere for a page and a half. Why bring it up if Penny isn't going to think about it? Something similar happens with Sam's “documentary”.
I have to say that I enjoyed the anima short story in the novel much more than I enjoyed the novel.
So, some of the reviews of this book are unjustly harsh. To be fair, some of the reviews are based solely on the book's cover (WHY do people do that?) It's not a bad book. I'm looking forward to the discussion of it.