Kenna Rowan is a twenty-three-year-old woman who has just served five years for a mistake that cost a boy his life, and who now stands outside her own daughter’s window with no legal right to knock. Here’s my honest, spoiler-free take on the Reminders of Him audiobook.
That is the whole coiled tension of Reminders of Him in one image, and it is why I stayed up far too late with this one. Colleen Hoover hands us a protagonist that everyone in town has already decided to hate, then dares us to keep listening as Kenna tries to earn back a place in the life of the daughter she has never met. It is not a comfortable premise. It is also, in audio, completely magnetic.
| Author | Colleen Hoover |
|---|---|
| Narrator | Brittany Pressley, Ryan West |
| Length | 10 hrs and 17 mins |
The performance is what tips this from a good listen into a memorable one. Brittany Pressley voices Kenna with a bruised, careful steadiness, the sound of someone who has learned to brace before she speaks because she expects the door to close. When Kenna finally lets a sentence run long and unguarded, you feel it, because Pressley has spent hours holding her back. Ryan West takes the other half of the dual narration and gives Ledger, the one person willing to give Kenna a chance, a warmth that never curdles into rescue-fantasy. The two voices trade the story back and forth across 10 hours and 17 minutes, and the alternating perspectives are where the audio format quietly earns its keep: you get to sit inside both the fear and the reluctant softening at the same time.
What surprised me most is how much of this book is about a town rather than a couple. Kenna’s every attempt to reconnect runs straight into a wall of people grieving the same loss she is, and Hoover refuses to let anyone be a cardboard villain. The grandparents raising her daughter are not cruel; they are frightened. That refusal to simplify is what kept me pressing on past the point where I would normally set a romance aside. If you have been burned by Hoover’s more polarizing plot swerves before, I will gently say this one is more grounded, more interior, and less interested in shocking you than in wearing you down until you are quietly rooting for a woman you started out unsure about.
A short content-notes aside, because this book earns it: expect grief, incarceration, a fatal drunk-driving accident kept mostly off the page, one frank sexual scene, and a persistent thread of self-blame that can sit heavy. None of it is gratuitous, but it is a heavier emotional load than the cover’s soft palette suggests. Go in when you have the bandwidth for it. Get the Reminders of Him Audiobook on AmazonListen on Audible · also in Kindle & print
By the final chapters I had stopped keeping score of whether Kenna deserved forgiveness and started simply hoping for it, which is exactly the sleight of hand Hoover is going for. Pressley lands the last stretch without a single overplayed note. It is the kind of ending that makes you sit in a parked car for a minute before you go inside.
What to cue up next
- It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover — for the same willingness to sit with a hard, morally tangled choice instead of tidying it away.
- Ugly Love by Colleen Hoover — if the dual-timeline ache of Kenna and Ledger worked on you, this one twists the knife in a similar rhythm.
- Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score — a lighter small-town landing spot when you need warmth after all that grief.
If you only try one Hoover on audio this year, I would make a real case for this being it. The narration does the emotional heavy lifting that the page alone can’t, and the payoff is worth the ache. Get the Reminders of Him Audiobook on AmazonListen on Audible · also in Kindle & print
Two quick questions before you go: Do you tend to give unlikeable narrators a full book to win you over, or bail early? And when a story splits its narration between two voices, does that pull you in deeper or make you miss a single storyteller?