The Bride Test

The Bride Test, Helen Hoang, 2019. Much like her first book The Kiss Quotient, this is a het contemporary romance with vivid, genre-unusual characters, in this case an autistic Vietnamese-American man and the Vietnamese hotel housecleaner his mother imports as a mail-order bride for him. As with Kiss Quotient, the romance here hangs a little more heavily on sexual attraction than is my personal favorite formula for these things, but the characters are well-developed in addition to that and have some good moments. And it's fun to get to read about characters who aren't the same two generic white people - okay, that's unfair, there is lots of good romance with very specific white people. Just not so much with Asians, or neurodiverse people. Anyways, if you liked Kiss Quotient you'll like this, and if you haven't read Kiss Quotient you could start with either, it's romance, it's not like you're going to get spoiled for the couples ending up together.

games!

I played four new-to-me games at Alum Weekend, a high-water mark in new games for me since having kids, I suspect. Mapmaker: the Gerrymandering Game was fun; we joked around about subconscious bias for or against the four parties, but I actually do wonder if it just "felt natural" to be more concerned about blocks of red elephants than blocks of green leaves. Blue Lagoon was pretty and fun, sort of a cross between a train game and the scoring of Ra, maybe (but not the gameplay of Ra). Of the four, it's the one I'm most interested in playing again. I'd been very interested in Anomia after hearing someone's description of it, but it turned out to be too shouty for me, and also I was drastically slower at the pattern-matching part of it than other people, like I would still be trying to figure out if there were any matches on the table and someone else would be shouting a word at me before I even knew what the categories were. One of those "you don't always know where you have processing deficits until you run into them" moments, I guess. Petrichor had a cute premise and some interesting mechanics but I was possibly slightly more tired than I thought it was, or the gameplay was just too fiddly, because I was constantly confused about what was happening in what order or why the thing that just happened wasn't the thing that I thought would happen. Also played a great Name Game and some good Codenames and got to hold two super-adorable babies and meet an old friend's newish husband and generally wallow in the whole "being surrounded by people I love in one of my favorite places" thing, to get briefly sappy.