Chastised for being unable to cry at his best-friend and cousin’s funeral, Khải comes to believe that he is unnaturally unfeeling, unable to love. Khải is actually autistic, a diagnosis his immigrant Vietnamese family mostly ignores, instead thinking him as simply a little strange. In Vietnam, My/Esme is just a bit strange too, but in her Khải’s mother sees the perfect bride for her son - humble, hard-working and honest.

While The Bride Test is at points quite funny, at its center it is a deeply emotional story about familial bonds and an immigrant's desperate striving to make a better life for herself and her family. Hoang parallels My’s experiences as a new immigrant trying to figure out the rules of a new culture as an outsider to Khải’s autism and his efforts to navigate the feelings and reactions he doesn’t fully understand. Both My and Khải have to work very hard to decode each other’s feelings and intentions, working to overcome their differing cultural expectations and learn each other boundaries.

 Five years ago, Pat and Fen almost stole the spotlight from Curtis and DaSilva in Charles’s Think of England. Their mismatched charm, and utter competence save the day and left readers begging for their story. Proper English, a delightfully dark house party mystery, is that story, set two years before Think of England. While the focus in Proper English is firmly on the central quartet of Jimmy, Billie, Pat and Fen, Charles continues to excels at creating with fascinating secondary characters who love to steal scenes. From the loyal and serious Victoria Singh, to the tart and savvy Travers, Charles fills this novel with women who are not to be underestimated, not even brittle and bitter Lady Anna.

Getting Hot with the Scot is a whirlwind roadtrip romance with a just-a-fling beginning and a swoonworthy hero. Reader, I loved it.

This is a very Suzanne set of mini-reviews, with her thoughts on I Flipping Love You, Can't Escape Love, and Hunted.

Do you ever read a book that makes you want to just devour an author's entire backlist? And then you discover that they have 1,000 books in said backlist? Welcome to my experience reading An Affair in Winter, by Jess Michaels.

I need to open with something that influenced my opinion on this book quite considerably: I’m really bad with names. I have read books, absolutely loved them and then had to look up the names of the main characters a day later. Sometimes I read something, take a break, come back and go “Wait? Who’s that guy?” - especially when the book has a lot of characters and/or they have names that are very foreign to me. And Sunkissed Feathers & Severed Ties has a lot of fantasy names.

In the Austen Playbook, Parker delights with a clever opposites-attract romance.

To write this post, I did a little GoodReads research to find out if I had reviewed the three books in this series yet. I'm a little disappointed in myself, if I'm honest.

Book Five in Cathy Yardley’s Fandom Hearts series, Playing Doctor, finally treats us to Cressida’s story. I think my wife and I have been eagerly rooting for this Frost sister’s Happily Ever After since at least Book Two. The Frost sisters all live together and jointly run a bookstore (and now fandom destination) in Snoqualmie, WA. Cressida, because of her acute agoraphobia, is far more sheltered than her sisters. As the book opens,one of her coping mechanisms is to find adventure vicariously on internet message boards devoted to finding the treasure hidden by an eccentric author of one of her favorite books. Working with her internet crush (and hero of Playing Doctor), Noah, she sets off in the family RV to have her own real-life adventure.

Two disclosures before I start this review: 

1) I'm not sure I'm able to be objective about it since my response is so strongly emotional

2) There's a bit of a spoiler in the second paragraph but not really a spoiler? You'll see.