Khai was just a teenager when he lost his best friend in a horrible accident. Sitting at Andy’s funeral, Khai wanted to grieve for him, he wanted to feel bad and cry and join in with the rest of the family in expressing the loss. But he couldn’t. He just couldn’t express his sadness. He didn’t even feel sadness. He felt like less than a person.

Ten years later, his mother decided it was time for Khai to get married. Although she and her two sons live in California, she went to her native Vietnam to find Khai a wife. After several failed interviews with gold-digging women, she meets a humble woman cleaning the hotel’s bathroom. Esme’s kindness and compassion stood out, so Khai’s mother makes a deal with her. She will bring Esme to California for 3 months to meet Khai and convince him to marry her. If she succeeds, she will be his wife. If she fails, she will have a return ticket to Vietnam.

Esme isn’t thrilled to be working as a toilet cleaner, but she’s doing her best to provide for her mother and grandmother as well as for her young daughter Jade. Esme isn’t afraid of hard work. But this opportunity to go to California for 3 months, to try to convince a very handsome man (Khai’s mother showed her a picture) to marry her? How often does an opportunity like that fall in your lap? Esme doesn’t want to leave her daughter for so long, but the thought of a better life for her family is something she just can’t pass up.

Khai doesn’t want to get married, and he definitely doesn’t want some stranger moving into his house for 3 months, but he made a deal with his mother. He will allow this, and if it doesn’t work out between Esme and himself, then his mother will stop playing matchmaker for him forever. That offer is too tempting for Khai to pass up, so he reluctantly agrees.

It’s only 3 months. What could go wrong?

Everything, it turns out.

Communication issues. Lifestyle differences. Secrets. Lies. Misunderstandings. A broken shower and a dripping wet woman in nothing but a towel. Can a marriage be built on these? Or is it simply a way for 2 people to fall in love?

Helen Hoang’s The Bride Test, her follow up to The Kiss Quotient, is a charming romantic comedy about an arranged marriage and the difficulty that real human beings have when things get arranged for them. The struggles that Khai and Esme have are universal to all relationships, and their thoughts and feelings add depth and meaning to this story.

I listened to the audio book for this one, so I had narrator Emily Woo Zeller helping me out with the Vietnamese and adding extra charm to Esme’s character. However, even with her lovely voice, I had some trouble relating to these characters at times. I wanted to like this book more than I did. I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t love it either.

Khai is autistic, and one of the reasons I wanted to read this book is because I’d heard great things about Hoang’s ability to write romances with autistic characters. And I did enjoy that. I thought she did a good job. But his autism and his emotional shut-down from Andy’s death blurred for me, and I struggled to separate which of his characteristics were based on the autism and which on the emotional damage. I thought that could lead to misunderstandings about what autism is and what it isn’t. Other than that, I enjoyed this book and was very happy at the ending.

Galleys for The Bride Test were provided by Berkley through Edelweiss, with many thanks, but the audio book I bought myself, thanks to Audible.