Talk to Reminders of Him like its author wrote you back.
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What it argues
Kenna Rowan is released from prison after serving five years for a drunk driving accident that killed her boyfriend Scotty. She returns to his hometown with one purpose: to meet the daughter she gave birth to just before incarceration and who has been raised by Scotty's parents. Ledger Ward — Scotty's best friend and the owner of the bar where Kenna finds work — is the character she must get past, and the person she ends up falling for.
The novel's premise is its best feature. Unlike most Hoover romances where the obstacle to the relationship is internal — emotional unavailability, a past secret — here the obstacle is concrete and morally serious. Kenna killed someone these people loved. The Landry family's resistance to her seeing their granddaughter isn't irrational or cruel; it's earned. The book's job is to complicate that certainty without erasing it, and to some extent it succeeds. Ledger's arc from protective loyalty to unwilling complicity to love is the most complex emotional journey in Hoover's contemporary fiction.
What it gets right
- 1.
Kenna's guilt is not treated as something to overcome but as something to live with — the book's emotional honesty is in refusing to fully redeem her in the Landry family's eyes.
- 2.
Ledger's loyalty conflict between his dead best friend and his feelings for Kenna is the novel's most interesting moral problem.
- 3.
The epistolary structure — Kenna's letters to Scotty — creates dramatic irony since the reader knows what Kenna is withholding from herself.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Colleen Hoover is an American author who self-published her debut novel Slammed in 2012 and became one of the bestselling fiction writers of the 2020s largely through reader word-of-mouth on BookTok. She has published more than twenty novels across romance, new adult, and contemporary fiction, including It Ends with Us, Verity, and Ugly Love. She co-founded the charity The Bookworm Box, which donates proceeds to various organizations. Reminders of Him became her bestselling title in 2022 and spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.
