As a mixed-race girl living in the slums of Ho Chi Minh City, Esme Tran has always felt out of place. When the opportunity arises to come to America and meet a potential husband, she can’t turn it down, thinking this could be the break her family needs. Seducing Khai, however, doesn’t go as planned. Esme’s lessons in love seem to be working…but only on herself. She’s hopelessly smitten with a man who’s convinced he can never return her affection.
With Esme’s time in the United States dwindling, Khai is forced to understand he’s been wrong all along. And there’s more than one way to love.
Comment: The debut's book by this author was very successful and that immediately made readers confident in trying her second one. I, too, was quite curious to have another story by her.
In this novel we have the story of Khai, a secondary character from the first book. Khai hasn't had air time, he was just mentioned because of his autism, slightly different in the spectrum from Stella, the heroine of that book.
Now we get to know Khai and he is a very serious and logical person, as expected, and despite his considerations on not being able to feel love or other emotions because of how he reacts to a certain situation, he does care about his family and that is easily proved by how he respects and wants to make his mother happy by accepting to live with My/Esme, a young woman coming from Vietnam to be his fiancé.
Esme, as she wants to be called during her adventure in America, is a single mother who helps to take care of her mother and grandmother in a very difficult place to hold a job. She works cleaning toilets but of course hopes for something better, to do better by her daughter. She accepts to go to America not only for the money but because she believes she will be doing her best by her family.
Will Esme and Khai find common ground to be happy for more than just a pretend engagement?
I liked the simplicity and the guilelessness of this story. It reads as a sort of fairy tale but precisely the fact both main characters are without malice is what makes this a sweet, fresh novel to read. I don't need to worry about some evil character coming out of nowhere to cause issues to our couple, the biggest adversity they face is their own emotions. For me, the reason why this book wasn't perfect is just the easy manner in which things are solved. This is directly linked to the lack of pages in the end and I'd have preferred a longer novel.
Some readers have commented about the way Esme doesn't share with those she gets to know the fact she has a daughter. However, this detail as not that important for me in the big scheme of things because Esme's fears and doubts sound very genuine. In an era where we tend to assume young women in western countries just take for granted how others would react to their behaviors, the same cannot be said for every women in the planet. Esme didn't know if her relationship with Khai would work out so I can understand her reluctance to say something that would obviously impact how others would think of her, Khai in particular, if he were to think of her as a serious person to consider for marriage. I think the way she told Khai worked out pretty well.
The interactions between Khai and Esme were both funny and sweet. People aren't always in the same page and despite Khai's mother wanting them together maybe they wouldn't suit but of course, they do and the fun part of the story is to see it happen. It's true some situations do appear a bit too easy but in a book without much development besides the necessary, I'd say things are simply done without waste of time and words.
Of course there are some obstacles but if everything was easy, then we wouldn't feel like they had deserved to find their HEA.
Probably, the biggest issue for me ended up being how things are so easily solved. Esme also wanted to find her father and she knew he lived in California too. How this is done and concluded was a bit too sugary, even for a sweet story like this one.
I was not surprised by how Esme managed to do the right thing and by sharing things she was embarrassed by, she discovered she was more respected by who she is than by the things she knew or that she could do. After all, everyone can learn but I must say this also sounded a bit too simple (how Esme goes from someone with difficulty in speaking English to how she ends the novel as) but again, not impossible.
Perhaps it's more fair to say some situations felt like we had time to process and see them happening and in the end it was just said so it doesn't feel as if it was well developed.
The author includes many important details about autism but she is quite clear to explain everyone is different and each person, even sharing the same "label" might not behave the same way. I liked it that Khai was portrayed in a different manner to Stella but since I was more concerned by who he was as a person and not how he behaved, it just felt natural for who he was.
When I turned the last page, despite the not so good details (in my POV), I was just happy to have read this book and that is what counts, after all.
Grade: 8/10
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