The Bride Test

"While working at a hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, Esme gets an offer that’s tough to pass up: The mother of a handsome Silicon Valley accountant wants her to come to California and marry her son. The only catch? Esme has just a few months to make Khai fall in love with her – and expressing emotions (never mind being in a relationship) has never come easily for him. Helen Hoang, author of The Kiss Quotient, has written another complex, swoon-worthy love story."

"I really loved this. It’s so good. It’s a story about two people falling in love, of course, because that’s the heart of every romance, but it’s also a story of coming to America. It’s about a woman from Vietnam , Esme, who’s convinced to come and try to woo a young man by his mother. She’s doing it partly because she wants to have a better life for her family and for her daughter. So, it’s both a story of her meeting him in these funny circumstances, but also it’s a story of her figuring out her way in America, figuring out English and making her own path. I love that it’s both of those things. And hearing Emily Woo Zeller narrate means you get to hear all these Vietnamese words and phrases and conversations in a way that you can understand what’s going on. It’s all done within context, but you can hear the right tones and hear how it’s supposed to be pronounced, which adds so much to the story. “I chose some of my all-time favourites that I would recommend to other people” The author Helen Hoang’s first book was The Kiss Quotient , which was also excellent. But I really love this one, because added in the mix is this amazing character, Esme. Khai, the main male character, is Vietnamese also, but he doesn’t have the language very strongly. The two of them are conversing to each other: she’s talking in Vietnamese, he’s talking in English, they both understand a little bit. And you hear Esme learning English more as you go through the story. The narrator, Emily, did a great job translating that too. You can hear her English getting stronger and stronger as she goes. Khai is autistic, and so is the author. She has talked a bit about what that meant for her, to be writing an autistic hero, and an autistic heroine in The Kiss Quotient . She does it beautifully. Part of the story is that he’s always been told that he doesn’t feel emotions the right way. So he’s working through this relationship and figuring out how he feels about Esme and also recognizing that he, of course, does feel emotions, it’s just differently. Both of them grow so much over the course of the story. It’s very funny. It’s definitely steamy. It’s just a great listen. And honestly, that’s one of the things I love about getting to listen to audiobooks, you get to hear the accents, and the different character voices, and if there’s other languages in it that aren’t English, you get to hear those too. If the narrator does a good job, you get all the emotions of the conversations, and the context, but you also get to hear how things are actually pronounced. It’s really such an added bonus of getting to listen."