Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him opens with an almost impossible emotional hill to climb: after serving five years in prison for a tragic mistake that cost her boyfriend Scotty’s life, twenty-six-year-old Kenna Rowan returns to her hometown hoping to reunite with the four-year-old daughter she gave birth to behind bars. The catch? Everyone in Scotty’s circle has spent five years making sure Kenna stays erased from her child’s life.
Grief, Blame, and the Fight for a Second Chance
What keeps the ten-hour story from tipping into soap-opera melodrama is how honestly Hoover writes the anatomy of grief. Scotty’s parents aren’t cartoon villains; they are shattered people whose survival depends on having someone to blame. And Kenna’s desperation isn’t loud or theatrical—it is the quiet, relentless ache of a mother writing letters she can never mail and counting every small kindness in a town that wants her gone.
The one unexpected complication is Ledger Ward, the local bar owner and Scotty’s closest friend, who has been a second father to Kenna’s daughter since the day she was born. When Ledger and Kenna cross paths before he realizes who she actually is, the moral and emotional stakes lock in immediately.
Brittany Pressley and Ryan West in Dual POV
On audio, Brittany Pressley and Ryan West elevate every chapter. Pressley doesn’t just read Kenna—she inhabits her. There is a fragile, weathered honesty in Pressley’s voice that makes you feel like you are overhearing someone’s most private confessions, and when her voice cracks during the letters and third-act confrontations, the emotion is completely unforced.
Ryan West is the ideal counterbalance as Ledger: warm, gravelly, and audibly torn between his loyalty to Scotty’s grieving parents and his growing conviction that Kenna deserves grace. Switching between their chapters gives you two distinct emotional landscapes rather than a simple recap of the same scenes.
Slow-Burn Payoff
While a few internal monologues repeat themselves in the middle chapters, the slow-burn romance and family reckoning build naturally without instalove shortcuts. Listeners who appreciated the high-stakes emotional recovery of It Ends With Us or the slow-building catharsis of November 9 will find both narrators at the absolute top of their game here.
