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Khai is on the autism spectrum; he doesn’t tend to look people in the eyes, and he misses some social cues. He has family galore and they mean a lot to him, but he doesn’t feel or express emotion like most other people, so he assumes he just doesn’t “love” like everyone else. He’s disappointed about it, but he’s accepted it. But he’s gone about his life; he runs a successful business and has a house of his own, where everything is arranged just so and he has a predictable schedule.
But then Khai’s mom decides to get involved with his love life — or rather, lack of it. She travels from their city in the Bay Area back to Vietnam to find a woman whom she thinks will be a good bride for her unusual son.
For her part, My is a hard worker and mother of a little girl; she’s poor and has been raised by her mother and grandmother; her American father was never in the picture. She’s astonished when a clearly wealthy woman comes into the hotel bathroom she’s cleaning and proposes that she come to California for the summer to see if she can make a relationship work with the woman’s son. After weighing her options and the goals she has for her and her daughter, My agrees, and she flies to America, having adopted the name Esmeralda.
Khai is beside himself when his mother brings Esme to his house, but he accepts her proposal as well: just give Esme a fair chance, and if it really doesn’t work out, she’ll stop bugging him about finding a wife.
Esme finds Khai very handsome and hopes to make it work with him, but she is confused by his strange reactions to her and what she tries to do to get to know him or even to seduce him. But she is determined, and she finds ways here and there to draw him out. But even as she finds herself falling for him, she is hurt when he insists he simply can’t love.
This is a sweet story about a man who has to learn about love through a different lens than many other people, and about a woman who has been an outsider all her life too, but for different reasons. Helen Hoang writes in the Author’s Note about how My/Esme came to be such a strong part of the story, and Hoang based a lot about her on her own immigrant mother. She ended up spending a lot of time talking to her mother about her experiences and getting to know her more fully.
She says, “I was able to give Esme a depth and soul that I wouldn’t have otherwise… More important, the conversations gave me my mom, the fuller, more authentic version of her, and now I love her even more, respect her even more.” It does come through in the book, and I appreciated both Esme and Khai for who they were and how they grew. Their stories alone are good, and together, their love story is sweet. I do appreciate immigrant stories, particularly those from Asian countries, as my husband immigrated from the Philippines with his parents when he was only a toddler. Learning more about these people, their cultures, what they had to leave behind, what they had to do to get here to the U.S., what they did to become successful here financially and for their children to become full-fledged Americans is always valuable.
Rated: High, for nearly 40 uses of strong language, more instances of mild and moderate language, and a couple of uses of the name of Deity; there are a number of spots of vulgar talk and references to masturbating; two sex scenes are pretty detailed and steamy.
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