Kay Hudson

I picked up The Kiss Quotient after reading an article about its author, Helen Hoang, a woman who was diagnosed with autism (at the high functioning end of the spectrum) at the age of 34. Given at last some insight into the problems she had dealt with through the years, Hoang decided to write about an autistic heroine.

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Stella Lane comes from a wealthy family, but she’s made her own fortune through her work as an econometrician, a mathematical and statistical occupation ideally suited to her personality. Her social life isn’t so successful. In fact, it’s pretty much non-existent. She’s nearing thirty, and she’s had three sexual experiences, all of them disasters. Her mother wants grandchildren, and Stella herself thinks there might be more to life than binge watching Korean drama shows. So she does what anyone with tunnel vision and determination might do—she hires a male escort to teach her “how to do sex.”

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Michael Phan is half Vietnamese and half Swedish, handsome and athletic. On Friday nights he works as, let’s be honest here, a prostitute. He has his reasons, thinks he does, anyway, and he’s at heart a nice guy (although he worries about that—his father wasn’t). He tries his best to avoid ever having a second “date” with a client, so he’s very reluctant to accept an exclusive job with Stella. At least until he gets to know her.

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There’s a lot of graphic sex in this novel. Not my favorite reading, frankly, but Stella wants to learn about sex, so that’s sort of the point. But seeing the world through Stella’s eyes, and seeing Stella through the eyes of a writer who really knows what makes Stella tick, is fascinating, and that’s what makes The Kiss Quotient such a good book.

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The Bride Test, Hoang’s second novel, is not about learning “how to do sex”; there’s bit of that, but much less graphic sex than in The Kiss Quotient. Rather, The Bride Test is about learning how to recognize love when it knocks you off your feet. In a reversal of roles, in this book the hero is on the autism spectrum, while the heroine, a village girl from Vietnam, has no idea what that means.

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Khai Diep (Michael’s cousin and Quan’s brother from the previous book) is a highly successful CPA, although he lives modestly and has little interest in money. He is convinced that he has no feelings, that his heart is stone, and that involving himself in any relationship would only be cruel to the other person. His mother knows better, and she goes to Vietnam to find him a wife.

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The potential bride she finds is Esme Tran, who lives with her daughter, her mother and her grandmother in a shack, and who cleans the bathrooms in a hotel to support them. When Khai’s mother offers her a summer in California to see if she’s a match for Khai, Esme decides (with encouragement from her mother) to take the chance. (And if she’s very lucky, she might even track down her American father, knowing only that his name was Phil, he went to Cal Berkley, and he must have been the source of Esme’s green eyes.)

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Two people from wildly different cultures, backgrounds and educational levels—what could possibly go wrong? And what could possibly go right? Will Khai (with help from some very funny conversations with Michael and Quan) ever figure out what love is? Will Esme, diving into the local night school for immigrants, exceed her own expectations? Will the ending produce a few happy tears? Hey, folks, this is a romance. You know the answers, but getting there is definitely worth reading the book.