Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover: A Full Summary and Guide
What Reminders of Him is about
Colleen Hoover published Reminders of Him in 2022. It is a contemporary romance built around a woman almost nobody in her hometown wants to see again.
Kenna Rowan pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter after a car accident that killed her boyfriend, Scotty Landry. Six years later she is released on parole and returns to the town where it happened. She has one real goal. During her sentence she gave birth to a daughter, Diem, now five years old and raised by Scotty's parents, Grace and Patrick Landry. Kenna has never met her.
The novel follows what happens when a person who has served her sentence discovers that the legal debt and the human one are not the same thing. Kenna takes a flat in a low-income housing complex, adopts a kitten at her landlady's insistence, and spends fruitless days looking for work before a sympathetic grocery store worker named Anna helps her land a job bagging groceries. She also befriends Lady Diana, a younger neighbour with Down syndrome whose own father is in prison.
Then she walks into the bookshop she and Scotty once loved. It is a bar now. She gets on well with the owner and turns down his invitation to a date, and only afterwards works out who he is: Ledger Ward, Scotty's lifelong best friend, a former NFL player who still lives across the street from the Landrys and acts as a surrogate uncle to Diem. That coincidence sets the whole book in motion.
The main characters
Kenna carries the novel. She is the narrator of her own guilt as much as her own story, and much of what the reader learns about the night Scotty died comes through a diary she has been keeping. She is not asking to be forgiven so much as to be allowed within sight of her child.
Ledger Ward is the point where Kenna's past and present touch. He loved Scotty, he loves Diem, and he blames Kenna along with everyone else. He is also the only person in town willing to speak to her like a human being, which puts him in an impossible position with the Landrys.
Grace and Patrick Landry are the grieving parents who have become the parents again. Grace dodges Diem's questions about why her mother is not around. Patrick's grief shows up as anger, and at one point it turns physical when he finds out Ledger has been seeing Kenna.
Diem is five, and she is the reason everyone behaves the way they do. Supporting figures include Roman, Ledger's friend and co-worker, and Lady Diana, whose situation quietly mirrors Kenna's from the other side.
The themes
Redemption is the engine. The book asks a blunt question: once the sentence is served, who decides when a person has paid enough? The law has an answer. The Landrys have a different one, and the novel takes their position seriously rather than treating them as obstacles.
Grief and blame sit next to each other throughout. Everyone in this story lost Scotty, including Kenna, and the family's need to hold someone responsible is what keeps a child from her mother.
Then there is identity. Kenna is a mother who has never held her daughter, a fact she reveals to Ledger in one of the book's hardest scenes, because Diem was born prematurely and taken away. Motherhood here is something claimed rather than something given.
Love runs through all of it, romantic and otherwise. The romance between Kenna and Ledger is genuine, but it is also a betrayal in the eyes of the people he cares about, and the book does not pretend otherwise.
How it ends
Skip this section if you want the ending fresh.
Kenna eventually tells Ledger the full truth of the crash. Both she and Scotty were high. She freed herself from the car, could not find a pulse because the blood supply to his arm had stopped, and assumed he was dead. She went looking for help and nobody came. Police found her unconscious and arrested her. She pleaded guilty out of guilt, and only afterwards learned she was pregnant.
When Kenna decides to leave town, Ledger takes her diary and gives it to Grace and Patrick, asking them to read the pages about that night. Grace changes her mind. She returns the diary and tells Kenna that Scotty would have wanted her to meet their daughter. Kenna comes to dinner, introduces herself to Diem first as Ledger's friend and then as her mother, and Diem falls asleep on her. Later, Ledger drives Kenna and Diem to the crash site, where they put Scotty's roadside memorial back up.
Why it still matters
Hoover is one of the most widely read novelists of the last decade, and Reminders of Him is among the titles that built that following. It reached the screen in 2026 in a film directed by Vanessa Caswill, from a screenplay Hoover wrote with Lauren Levine, starring Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers alongside Rudy Pankow, Lauren Graham, Bradley Whitford and Lainey Wilson in her film debut. It premiered in Los Angeles on 9 March 2026 and Universal released it in the United States on 13 March. Reviews were mixed, but it grossed 89 million dollars against a 25 million dollar budget.
The book suits readers who want a romance with real weight behind it, and anyone drawn to stories about second chances, estrangement and families rebuilt around an absence. It is an emotionally heavy read. That is the point of it.
