Published by: Berkley
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Chick-Lit, Romance
Rating: 
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...
Remind me again why this book is so popular? Cause I don’t see it 🙅
After reading all these amazing reviews for The Kiss Quotient – almost all my GR friends gave it 4 to 5 stars- I read the blurb and easily dismissed it because I knew it wasn’t for me. More and more reviews started to come up about how wonderful this book is and I relented. Library waiting period was crazy, but I finally got it.
And it was a total disappointment.
I will start with the positives first. It always fills me with immense joy to see diverse groups of people being represented in books. This is the first book I've read with an autistic female lead and I couldn’t be happier that books like these exist and raise awareness of such matters. Like Hoang herself said in her note, the first book she read with autistic characters, led her through a journey of self-discovery and acceptance.
Aaaand that’s all for the positives.
It made me giddy inside to read about a woman hiring an escort just because she wanted to be serviced by and learn from a professional. Can I get a hallelujah for that please 🙏? Yes yes and yes, it ticks all my boxes and honestly, I personally find it a great idea. Why go on Tinder or meet some rando in a bar who could turn out to be a dud or a psycho? It’s a gig economy; hire a professional if you want something done right. I wholeheartedly agree and support that sentiment 👍
What I don't agree with is the part in Hoang's note where she says “but I hadn’t been able to figure out why a successful beautiful woman would hire an escort”. So successful and beautiful women shouldn’t hire an escort for some reason? Maybe they are lonely, maybe they had sexual partners that were utter shit before, maybe they just want to try it. So, only ugly and downtrodden women should hire escorts because, let’s be honest, no one else would want them? What? No!
I didn’t find the story interesting enough to draw me in. It was a very superficial boy meets girl scenario, with bare minimum backstory to fill the pages. The book was very romance heavy and even that was sickly sweet with A LOT of outdated clichés.(rich girl spends tens of millions of dollars to make a man she practically just met happy. What is this, the Dynasty?)
The sex was OK I guess, a bit weird and awkward at times. I understand that Michael was supposed to be more experienced, that was his whole shtick and the reason he was hired, but I got the sense that Stella was doing a lot of things she wasn’t particularly fond of doing but just because Michel “knew what he was doing” she should trust him and go with it. Not that he forced her to do anything, but there always this eek feeling of her being dragged to do something she was not comfortable doing. I guess that was my problem with the book: we were made to believe that Stella thought she was bad at sex because she was autistic. But 1. how being good at sex would help her in any way? and 2. why was she self-flagellating? She knew that her previous sexual partners were dicks and horrible in bed so what does that have to do with her sexual "performance" and her being autistic? That train of thought didn't make any sense to me and it ruined the whole concept of the book.
Her co-worker Philip had sexual harassment suit written all over him and he was admittedly disgusting. And he was portrayed as such, the monster and villain of the story. Well, the hero (Michael) didn't fair much better, let me tell you. After the woman he claims he loves and respects gets sexually assaulted, his go-to response was to kiss her long enough and passionately enough to erase the taste of the other guy in her mouth. Um, do you realise how gross and disgusting that is? And Stella went right with it, even though it goes so much against her character.
I rolled my eyes at all the things Michael and Stella had "in common", like watching K-dramas and Kung Fu movies. The “beautiful sexy but also quirky and nerdy girl” trope is soooooooo 10 years ago and honestly done to death.
Plus, these empty and superficial things are maybe cute yes, but where is the connection that actually matters? Where are the real conversations and the bearings of souls and actual no sexual intimacy that would justify them falling so hard and so fast for each other? I just don’t buy it.
For me the Kiss Quotient is undeservingly overhyped. It’s good for a quick beach read if you’re into something fluffy and a bit spicer than vanilla romances, but no more than that. I found it very mediocre, lost interest about halfway through and rolled my eyes at it a lot. There are so many good contemporary romances out there which are way more well written and thought out than The Kiss Quotient, you should try those.
After reading all these amazing reviews for The Kiss Quotient – almost all my GR friends gave it 4 to 5 stars- I read the blurb and easily dismissed it because I knew it wasn’t for me. More and more reviews started to come up about how wonderful this book is and I relented. Library waiting period was crazy, but I finally got it.
And it was a total disappointment.
I will start with the positives first. It always fills me with immense joy to see diverse groups of people being represented in books. This is the first book I've read with an autistic female lead and I couldn’t be happier that books like these exist and raise awareness of such matters. Like Hoang herself said in her note, the first book she read with autistic characters, led her through a journey of self-discovery and acceptance.
Aaaand that’s all for the positives.
It made me giddy inside to read about a woman hiring an escort just because she wanted to be serviced by and learn from a professional. Can I get a hallelujah for that please 🙏? Yes yes and yes, it ticks all my boxes and honestly, I personally find it a great idea. Why go on Tinder or meet some rando in a bar who could turn out to be a dud or a psycho? It’s a gig economy; hire a professional if you want something done right. I wholeheartedly agree and support that sentiment 👍
What I don't agree with is the part in Hoang's note where she says “but I hadn’t been able to figure out why a successful beautiful woman would hire an escort”. So successful and beautiful women shouldn’t hire an escort for some reason? Maybe they are lonely, maybe they had sexual partners that were utter shit before, maybe they just want to try it. So, only ugly and downtrodden women should hire escorts because, let’s be honest, no one else would want them? What? No!
I didn’t find the story interesting enough to draw me in. It was a very superficial boy meets girl scenario, with bare minimum backstory to fill the pages. The book was very romance heavy and even that was sickly sweet with A LOT of outdated clichés.(rich girl spends tens of millions of dollars to make a man she practically just met happy. What is this, the Dynasty?)
The sex was OK I guess, a bit weird and awkward at times. I understand that Michael was supposed to be more experienced, that was his whole shtick and the reason he was hired, but I got the sense that Stella was doing a lot of things she wasn’t particularly fond of doing but just because Michel “knew what he was doing” she should trust him and go with it. Not that he forced her to do anything, but there always this eek feeling of her being dragged to do something she was not comfortable doing. I guess that was my problem with the book: we were made to believe that Stella thought she was bad at sex because she was autistic. But 1. how being good at sex would help her in any way? and 2. why was she self-flagellating? She knew that her previous sexual partners were dicks and horrible in bed so what does that have to do with her sexual "performance" and her being autistic? That train of thought didn't make any sense to me and it ruined the whole concept of the book.
Her co-worker Philip had sexual harassment suit written all over him and he was admittedly disgusting. And he was portrayed as such, the monster and villain of the story. Well, the hero (Michael) didn't fair much better, let me tell you. After the woman he claims he loves and respects gets sexually assaulted, his go-to response was to kiss her long enough and passionately enough to erase the taste of the other guy in her mouth. Um, do you realise how gross and disgusting that is? And Stella went right with it, even though it goes so much against her character.
I rolled my eyes at all the things Michael and Stella had "in common", like watching K-dramas and Kung Fu movies. The “beautiful sexy but also quirky and nerdy girl” trope is soooooooo 10 years ago and honestly done to death.
Plus, these empty and superficial things are maybe cute yes, but where is the connection that actually matters? Where are the real conversations and the bearings of souls and actual no sexual intimacy that would justify them falling so hard and so fast for each other? I just don’t buy it.
For me the Kiss Quotient is undeservingly overhyped. It’s good for a quick beach read if you’re into something fluffy and a bit spicer than vanilla romances, but no more than that. I found it very mediocre, lost interest about halfway through and rolled my eyes at it a lot. There are so many good contemporary romances out there which are way more well written and thought out than The Kiss Quotient, you should try those.
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