The Kiss Quotient is OUT TODAY! Get it here.
Oh, our stellar recommendation isn’t enough for you to go pick up a book right now? You need like PLOT and CHARACTER DESCRIPTIONS and GENRE EVEN and SOME IDEA of what the book is about? Geez, alright, calm down. Here’s the official summary.
Stella Lane thinks math is the only thing that unites the universe. She comes up with algorithms to predict customer purchases–a job that has given her more money than she knows what to do with, and way less experience in the dating department than the average thirty-year-old.
It doesn’t help that Stella has Asperger’s and French kissing reminds her of a shark getting its teeth cleaned by pilot fish. Her conclusion: she needs lots of practice–with a professional. Which is why she hires escort Michael Phan. The Vietnamese and Swedish stunner can’t afford to turn down Stella’s offer, and agrees to help her check off all the boxes on her lesson plan–from foreplay to more-than-missionary position…
Before long, Stella not only learns to appreciate his kisses, but to crave all the other things he’s making her feel. Soon, their no-nonsense partnership starts making a strange kind of sense. And the pattern that emerges will convince Stella that love is the best kind of logic.
You guys! It’s SO CUTE, and completely un-putodownable, which should be an official book genre all on its own, right? The best news is The Kiss Quotient is our Boozy Book Club pick for June, and we will be chatting LIVE about it on June 25th. You have enough time to read the book 20 times before then, because it will take you less than one day from cover to cover.
And a bunch of you entered our giveaway for copies of the book in our Boozy Book Club May Wrap-Up and two of you won! Diana and Keary, we hope you are enjoying it! And if you haven’t gotten it yet, it’s on the way.
But enough about that, let’s get to the good stuff. Our interview with author, Helen Hoang. Helen was so generous to answer our fangirly questions about her sweet debut romance. We loved getting to know her better.
The Kiss Quotient was great, and we have questions
Stella’s story is almost a gender-bent version of Pretty Woman – did her story start out that way? What was your inspiration?
Prior to writing this book, I read an anthropological piece called Nightwork about women who work in hostess clubs in Tokyo, and I found it fascinating. It made me want to write about someone in a similar profession. Naturally, the film Pretty Woman came to mind, but after Fifty Shades of Grey’s extreme popularity, I didn’t think anyone would be interested in my version of a billionaire hero. The idea of gender-swapping the roles appealed to me for several reasons. However, I couldn’t figure out why a successful beautiful woman would hire an escort. When my daughter’s preschool teacher suggested she was on the spectrum, that sent me on a journey of exploration that resulted in my own diagnosis for autism spectrum disorder and the inspiration for Stella, The Kiss Quotient’s autistic heroine.
The heroine in The Kiss Quotient hires a male escort to get more dating and sexual experience. We are dying to know, what kind of research did you conduct on hiring escorts?
Aside from the aforementioned Nightwork, I didn’t do any other research on hiring escorts. (In retrospect, I’m seeing this was a missed opportunity. The things I could have learned!) As far as I know, I invented the Yelp-like website for escorts with reviews, star ratings, and a safety guarantee. If that’s how things really work, I’m impressed with the industry’s professionalism.
We think everyone will be able to relate to Stella’s awkwardness and insecurities when it comes to dating. Did you take from your personal dating experience when you were writing The Kiss Quotient?
Yes. My husband is my first and only boyfriend, but there were a handful of rather disastrous dating attempts before him. What I learned from those experiences was the importance of trust. Without trust, at least for me, there can’t be intimacy, and trust has to be earned at my pace.
We love that The Kiss Quotient features both a mixed race couple and a main character with autism. What do you hope readers take away from your debut novel?
One of my biggest struggles has always been self-acceptance. I used to put a lot of effort into changing myself to please people, and that worked—I was able to develop relationships of a sort. But they exhausted me, and as a result, they frequently ended in failure. In order to have real relationships, I needed to feel safe being who I am. In other words, I had to learn trust and self-acceptance.
I think those two things go hand-in-hand. As much as I wish I’d learned self-acceptance on my own, I realize that I needed someone to accept me the way I am before I could do it, too. Love makes you stronger, and it can come from unexpected places, because underneath it all, we’re more alike than we think.
You based Stella on your own experiences on the spectrum, and as a mother and wife of some amazing ADHD individuals, I loved how you nailed her experiences and perspective on the world. And I have to ask: as that family dinner scene was so painful, relatable, and real, did you pull that scene from real life experience?
That family dinner scene was the most difficult scene to write in the entire book. I rewrote it more than half a dozen times, trying to make it important plot-wise, but also to illustrate how someone can fail spectacularly in a social setting despite their best efforts and intentions. What I ended up doing for this scene was combining the worst parts of several of my past experiences to make one fantastically horrible experience for Stella.
The Kiss Quotient is such an innovative, important romance novel, what are some of your favorite books that also break the typical romance mold?
I really loved Susan Elizabeth Phillip’s Nobody’s Baby But Mine because it has that genius physicist heroine who selects a father for her baby with the criteria that he not be smart. In Sarah MacLean’s Never Judge a Lady by Her Cover, the owner of an illustrious gaming hall is a woman. Also, though it’s more of a romantic comedy than a romance, The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion has an atypical character in a leading role, searching for love just like everyone else.
Your website says The Kiss Quotient is the first in a series. Will future books in the series still feature Stella and Michael? Because we would definitely be happy to read more about them. Just saying…
The next books in the series are companion novels to The Kiss Quotient. The second book, The Bride Test, is about Michael’s cousin Khai. The third book belongs to Quan, but I’m still working on a title for that one.
The Kiss Quotient is just one of those books you have to share – our book club is reading it this month because a few of us couldn’t stop talking about it. What are some of the books you just can’t shut up about (besides your own, obviously)?
I’m so excited to hear that a book club plans to read The Kiss Quotient! When I started writing, I never imagined that would happen. Thank you!
Since I’ve been so busy writing, I’m woefully behind on current books, but I can tell you what I’m most looking forward to reading: Alyssa Cole’s Reluctant Royals books, Kate Clayborn’s Luck of the Draw, Christine Feehan’s Judgement Road, Christina Lauren’s Love and Other Words, Nalini Singh’s Silver Silence, Penny Reid’s Winston Brothers books, and Lynn Turner’s Pas de Deux.
