I’m So (Not) Over You by Kosoko Jackson

Narrated by Timothy Bell Reese

In I’m So (Not) Over You, 23-year-old Kian Andrews is just starting to move on from his break up with Hudson Rivers. He’d though they were the real deal but then Hudson broke his heart. So he knows it’s a bad idea to say yes to Hudson’s request for a coffee – at the same café where they split up no less! But he does it anyway.

Hudson’s parents are coming into town and they don’t approve of him after his choice to study psychology rather than go into the family brewing business. (Rivers & Valleys is a billion+ dollar business and the Rivers family are super wealthy.) He asks Kian to pretend to still be his boyfriend as his parents liked Kian when they met and don’t know they broke up. Hudson thinks this will make the visit easier for him. Kian refuses (of course) but then Hudson offers to put him in touch with the CEO of an online publication – the same place Kian has been trying to get an interview so he can get his start in journalism.

The dinner is not entirely successful but then Hudson’s mother springs a surprise on both of them – they’re invited to a family wedding in Atlanta and suddenly Hudson is begging Kian to keep up the ruse for the 3 days of celebrations.

There was a lot to like about the story, particularly the characters. Kian is the only POV character and he is funny, self-deprecating and full of entertaining analogies. His best friend, Divya, is amazing; supportive, sassy and tough. Hudson is wealthy but isn’t snobby. Hudson’s sister, Olivia, is a corporate shark and has many sharp edges.

Kian has a habit of getting side-tracked in his thinking and often goes on mental tangents mid-conversation. At first this was amusing but I admit I got a little frustrated by it later on when I started to lose track of what was happening.

Where the book didn’t work so well for me was in the plot. There were some key propositions that weren’t made out sufficiently for me. Hudson wanted Kian to pretend in the first place because his parents approved of Kian – and they didn’t actually seem to at all. Okay that may have been a ruse for Hudson to get Kian back but if it was, it was never addressed or explained in the book. Worse, I didn’t understand why Hudson and Kian had broken up in the first place and it therefore wasn’t clear to me that they’d fixed whatever was wrong so that I could be confident in their HEA. It seemed to me that Kian and Hudson, despite having dated for well over a year, didn’t know each other very well given the things that were revealed over the course of the wedding celebrations. The third act break up came very late in the piece. The mechanics of it were unexpected – I didn’t really understand why that was the reason and how those conclusions were reached. The words spoken by Hudson and some members of his family were devastating and I didn’t buy that Kian would be able to just forgive and forget. The reunion didn’t address those things in a meaningful way and Kian took responsibility for things that were not his fault. I’m not sure I thought Hudson deserved Kian by the end.

The story lost some momentum in the middle and my early glee with the book became less enthusiastic.

I expected some of my questions to be answered as the story played out but they weren’t. Mainly I had more questions.

On the other hand, the pop culture references were excellent and there were moments I laughed out loud during the listen – between Kian and Divya, there was no shortage of sizzling wit.

The author is a queer Black man and there was an obvious authority to the depiction of Kian and Hudson. The intersection of Blackness and queerness is part of the book and I appreciated the representation which was all organically part of the characters and the story.

And the narration was fantastic. I can’t find Timothy Bell Reese otherwise listed on Goodreads or at Audible so this may be his first narration. Which, if so, makes this even more of an amazing listen. Mr. Bell Reese’s character voices were top notch – from Hudson’s Georgia drawl which had a touch of warm honey to it, to the female cast members who sounded authentic and diverse, to Kian himself. There was a wonderful rhythm to the performance, the delivery of both the dialogue and the text had an almost perfect cadence which made those one-liners zing.

The emotion was all there as well. There are intimate scenes, times when the characters were happy and loving, times when they were frustrated with each other and times when they were actively fighting – all of it portrayed authentically.

All in all, I’m So (Not) Over You was a bit of a mixed bag from a content point of view but the narration made it a winner.

Kaetrin

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