Cue my STEFAN voice from Saturday Night Live: The Bride Test: This Book Had Everything.
The Bride Test is a fascinating, funny, and delightful romance taking place over the summer and during an arranged marriage’s engagement. Helen Hoang deserves all the awards!
The Bride Test PREMISE TIME
The premise boils down to the following: Esme and Khai spend a summer getting to know one another after Khai’s mother travels to Vietnam to find him a wife. The characters, however, are RICH.
Esme, a single mother living a life she didn’t plan in Vietnam, is truly a kind woman. When she’s offered the option to travel to California to see if she would like to marry Khai, at first she says no. When she thinks about it and talks it over with her own mother, she changes her mind. She wants options, she wants her daughter to have a better life, and she wants to travel. Her mother and her cannot find a downside.
A conflict that isn’t cheap!
The only problem, Khai’s mother did not check with Khai first before “finding him a wife.” His mother throws the entire idea at him with little warning. He only agrees to the proposition after his mother and he makes a deal that if he “tries” with Esme, she will stop her matchmaking and leave him alone. Khai, on the surface, seems like the kind of guy who wouldn’t struggle to find a wife in these types of books. He’s attractive, wealthy, and smart.
Here, is where the book shines, though: Khai struggles in this world due to neurodivergent tendencies (he’s autistic) and a guilt complex built around the death of his childhood best friend/cousin. This makes getting close to anyone difficult for him, so the idea of a woman living with him for a summer shocks him.
Nevertheless, they spend the summer getting to know one another, misunderstanding and then understanding each other, and then MAYBE
doing a little bang-bang… spoiler (but it is a romance, so is it really?)
I LOVED THIS BOOK.
I am a huge fan of romance novels. However, I struggle reading many of them due to the prevalence of toxic relationships, unattractive character personalities, and abusive relationship dynamics. At its surface, I expected the same of this book, but I was VERY WRONG.
Complex Characters ABOUND
Esme is a deeply complex character. She goes into the relationship with deceit on her mind (she hides that she’s a mother). Her goal is to get married, ger her citizenship, and fall in love. When it looks not to be going well, she starts studying for her GED and making friends with other immigrant women and men in her neighborhood. She has a beautiful journey where she gets to learn that she’s not stupid, she is kind, and she’s deserving in her own right of anything she wants.
Khai, ALSO, is a deeply complex character. I’ve touched a bit on what makes him an interesting leading man, but it gets deeper and deeper. Lately, I’ve been searching for books with autistic characters, and I often find out that they are terrible representations. Khai, on the other hand, is kinda wonderful. You can tell the author knows what they are talking about, and there’s no tokenism.
Khai has a deep misunderstanding of love based on a traumatic experience from his childhood and his family’s inability to understand him, and the author doesn’t shy away from that. When his best friend dies, he doesn’t emote the way others do, so he is told he must be incapable of love. Therefore, Khai truly believes he is unable to love someone, which makes him as a leading man of a romance novel, fascinating. Additionally, Khai is not a deeply tragic character like many authors write autistic characters to be. He is successful, funny, and kind. His brother is his best friend, and a huge advocate for him, his mother LOVES him, and he truly cares for Esme.
Are you reading The Bride Test yet?
The relationship Hoang writes about grows in depth and care, and it remains deeply innocent. I loved every minute of this book and devoured it in about 2 days.
While I’m sure another author could find fault with this book, I honestly couldn’t.
Also, after reading this book, I was starving for the food being described. I think I ordered takeout three times that week. In fact, in 2022, I’ve read a bunch of books that make leave me starving. This is one.
What’s a book you’ve read with positive neurodivergent representation?
