The Bride Test Review

Keeping with my 2020 trend of bingeing romance audiobooks, I finished The Bride Test in one day. I listened to The Kiss Quotient earlier this year, deep in lockdown, and The Bride Test keeps its sexy and heartfelt momentum. Helen Hoang’s writing style is light and easy, but she makes sure that her couples are sufficiently tested, so that the relationships still feel real. I also very much appreciate the disability representation, which I think is rare and even more rarely done right.

The characters are three-dimensional and watching them grow together is satisfying. Esme’s sense of self is especially refreshing, since the romance genre often relies on the self-doubt of women. Listening made me giggle and feel warm — a feat because I have been feeling very down, given [waving wildly] literally everything. The Bay Area setting made me even more homesick for Norcal and the beforetimes, but it was also comforting. Even if everything is terrible in this timeline, Esme, Khai, Michael, and Stella are living happily ever after. I am desperate for the third installment in this series.