Quick Take
- Narration: Candace Thaxton handles Jubilee’s interiority and Eric’s parallel storyline with the warmth the story requires, at over 11 hours giving both threads enough space.
- Themes: rare illness and isolation, the courage of re-entering the world, unexpected family formation
- Mood: Heart-wrenching and gently comedic, emotionally generous
- Verdict: Colleen Oakley’s novel uses Jubilee’s allergy to human touch as a precise metaphor for self-protective isolation, earning its tenderness without sentimentality.
I finished Close Enough to Touch on a Sunday evening after spending most of the afternoon with it. There is a particular kind of audiobook that you slow your pace for not because it is difficult but because you do not want to arrive at the end of it, and this was one of those. Colleen Oakley has written a love story in which the physical impossibility of touch is not a plot device to be overcome but a genuine condition that shapes every relationship Jubilee Jenkins has had or been denied for nearly a decade of self-imposed isolation.
Jubilee has a rare allergy to human touch. Any skin-to-skin contact could kill her. The story begins as she decides, after nearly ten years, to try to enter the world again. Armed with gloves and long sleeves and her bicycle, she returns to work at the local library. It is a choice that requires genuine courage, and Oakley treats it with the seriousness it deserves. This is not a whimsical premise. It is the detailed reconstruction of a life that has been made functionally impossible by a condition no one around Jubilee fully understands.
Two Lives That Cannot Quite Reach Each Other
The parallel structure of the novel gives equal weight to Eric Keegan’s story. A failed marriage, a daughter who has stopped speaking to him, a brilliant and psychologically troubled adopted son attempting telekinesis. Eric is, in the reviewer’s description, a man trying to figure out how his life got so off course. His encounter with Jubilee at the library checkout desk is the kind of beginning that sounds convenient in description and earned in execution, because Oakley has built both characters’ situations with enough specificity that their mutual appeal makes sense without the plot requiring it.
The romantic tension in Close Enough to Touch operates at a frequency that is specific to this premise: two people who are drawn to each other where the expression of that draw is physically impossible. Eric wanting nothing more than to be near her, as the synopsis describes it, is a real desire that the story refuses to collapse into metaphor. Jubilee’s condition is literal, and the book honors that literalism throughout. The readers who compared it favorably to Jojo Moyes and Graeme Simsion were pointing to the same quality: a love story that earns its emotions through the specificity of the people involved rather than the universality of the feelings described.
What the Reviewers Described as Heart-Wrenching and Why That’s Accurate
Multiple independent reviews describe this book as both heart-wrenching and humorous, and that combination is harder to achieve than either element separately. The humor comes from Jubilee’s perspective on a world that does not know how to accommodate her, from the deadpan management of logistics that most people take for granted, from Eric’s adopted son’s telekinesis experiments. The heart-wrenching quality comes from understanding how long Jubilee has been managing this, what the isolation has cost her, and what it means to choose to try again despite knowing what the trying costs.
The reviewer who described the book as having “a complex, touching, very unusual protagonist” and a story that is simultaneously deeply unique and, from the standpoint of human relationships, powerfully recognizable was identifying the thing Oakley does best: she writes particularity so specifically that it becomes universal. Jubilee is not a symbol of isolation in general. She is this specific woman, with this specific condition, making this specific choice. At 11 hours and 38 minutes, there is enough space for both her and Eric’s stories to develop at the pace they require.
Who Should Listen / Who Should Skip
This is for listeners who enjoy literary-leaning contemporary romance where the obstacles between the characters are genuine rather than manufactured misunderstandings, who are drawn to protagonists navigating re-entry after long absence, and who appreciate a parallel structure that treats the secondary perspective as equally worthy of development. The comparison to Jojo Moyes is apt: this is a love story that takes loss seriously and earns its warmth by making the warmth cost something. Skip it if you prefer contemporary romance without disability or illness as structural elements, or if the slow development of both parallel storylines across a substantial runtime will feel too measured. Candace Thaxton’s narration is warm and technically accomplished, handling the tonal shifts between humor and devastation without stumbling.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the rare allergy premise require significant medical suspension of disbelief?
The book treats the allergy as a real medical condition rather than a fantastical element, and reviewers consistently describe it as convincing and emotionally coherent. The specifics of how Jubilee manages her daily life are detailed in ways that suggest research rather than convenience.
Is Eric’s storyline, with his adopted son’s telekinesis attempts and estranged daughter, as developed as Jubilee’s?
Reviewers describe it as a genuine parallel structure rather than a secondary thread. Eric’s situation is given enough interiority that his attraction to Jubilee makes narrative sense, and his family complications add emotional weight to his investment in being near someone he cannot simply touch.
How does this compare to Jojo Moyes’s style as the reviewers suggest?
The comparison is to One Plus One specifically, which shares the tonal range of emotional sincerity and humor, protagonists navigating genuinely difficult circumstances, and a romance that earns its resolution through character development rather than plot engineering.
Is there an explicit content note for this title?
No. This is a contemporary romance in the literary-leaning vein of Jojo Moyes rather than an erotica title. The intimacy between characters is handled with emotional rather than explicit focus, given the nature of Jubilee’s condition.
