There’s a lot going on in the world. Sometimes you want the security of reading a book with the certainty that everything is going to be alright in the end. That’s one of the reasons that Colleen Hoover has been so successful.
In Reminders of Him, the happy ending is a little harder to see coming. After all, it deals with a woman who gets out of jail and tries to reconnect with her daughter who was taken from her. Not exactly the ingredients to a happy-go-lucky romp. Except Hoover’s work implores readers to engage with full knowledge that it will all be alright, that this is just the backdrop for the feel-good story that you’ve been missing. The fact that the ending is predictable makes the journey no less entertaining. If anything, it was fun to see the ways that Hoover brought the reader on the long way around.
It takes a particular kind of skill for a writer to be able to make their work engaging when there is an expected outcome. When you’re writing off a formula, it is hard not to fall into tired tropes. But Reminders of Him was a breath of fresh air at a time when everyone wants us to take everything so seriously. It allowed me to enjoy the twists and turns without the foreboding doom that comes with far too many of our pop cultural standouts of late.
Four stars
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