Loved The Kiss Quotient, loved this. The miscommunication trope is something that gets a lot of hate - for good reason. It's often a lazy way to create conflict. But it's done right in this book: after Khai accepts that Esme is going to be a part of his life and in his space for the summer, Khai and Esme slowly circle each other -desperate to be understood. And there are very good reasons for them to misunderstand each other. They come from different cultures, they struggle to speak the same language, and Esme sometimes struggles to understand Khai's neurodiverse mind. I appreciate how different Hoang's representation of Khai's autism is from Stella's (TKQ) and found I deeply, deeply related to Khai's experience with grief and love and feeling like these experiences were something he could only observe from the outside but never experience himself. Watching him fall in love with Esme was perfection.