Quick Take
- Narration: Teddy Hamilton handles Deacon’s world with easy likability, though some reviewers feel the chemistry between the leads translates better on the page than through the audio.
- Themes: Reclaiming yourself after a long relationship, loyalty versus love, the particular pressure of a temporary situation
- Mood: Light and warm with a few sincere emotional moments that arrive quietly
- Verdict: A charming romance in the best brother-best-friend tradition, sweeter than it is spicy, more interested in self-discovery than heat, and honest about the trope it is working with.
I listened to most of The Re-Do List on a rainy Tuesday afternoon when I had a stack of other things to get through and needed something that would stay out of the way of thinking without disappearing entirely. Denise Williams’s romance landed exactly there: present enough to keep me company, pleasant enough not to demand more attention than I had to give, and occasionally catching me off guard with something that felt genuinely observed rather than constructed.
The setup is one of romance’s most reliable: Willow, reeling from the very public end of a relationship that had defined her since high school, arrives at her deployed brother’s place to dog-sit. The brother’s best friend, Deacon, is also around. He has promised two things: to look after Willow and to keep his hands to himself. Both promises become complicated at roughly the same pace. This is the brother-best-friend trope in its classic form, and Williams is not trying to subvert it. She is trying to execute it well, and for the most part she succeeds.
Our Take on The Re-Do List
What distinguishes this from many genre-adjacent romances is the framing device: Willow’s re-do list, a series of firsts she wants to reclaim because she experienced all of them with the same person in a relationship that ultimately cost her a significant piece of herself. The first dance, the first kiss, the first serious conversation about the future: these are not just plot beats but the architecture for Willow’s self-reclamation project. One reviewer described the book as being about recognizing how much of your love knowledge was built around giving up pieces of yourself for someone else, which is a more substantive emotional premise than the cover would suggest.
Deacon’s arc runs parallel rather than subordinate. He is a veteran navigating the complicated transition from military identity to civilian life, and Williams gives that process enough space to feel genuine rather than decorative. It is not the dominant emotional thread, this is Willow’s book, but it adds a layer of specificity that reviewers who stayed with the story appreciated. Even a reader who found the book overall lacking in chemistry praised this element as the most thoughtful part of the narrative.
Why Listen to The Re-Do List
If you have read Denise Williams’s earlier work, particularly Just My Luck, Deacon appears there as a secondary character, and this book offers the full-circle experience of watching him become the center of his own story. That continuity is not required for enjoyment of this novel, it functions completely on its own, but it rewards Williams’s existing readers with something that feels earned. The multicultural framing is present throughout without ever being the book’s primary focus, which is the quiet skill of writers who know how to make diversity simply descriptive rather than thematic scaffolding.
What to Watch For in The Re-Do List
Not every reader will find Willow and Deacon’s chemistry as convincing as the book needs it to be. One critical review notes the first kiss scene as forgettable and the spicy scenes as moving too fast to build genuine tension. That is a fair read of a book that is ultimately more interested in emotional intimacy than physical heat. If you come to this expecting sustained slow burn with significant payoff in the latter half, you may leave slightly disappointed. If you come to it for the emotional arc, two people figuring out who they are separately while falling for each other, the temperature feels right.
Who Should Listen to The Re-Do List
Romance readers who love the brother-best-friend trope and want a clean, competently executed version of it will find this satisfying. Listeners looking for significant heat should moderate expectations, this skews sweet. Those interested in self-recovery narratives wrapped in genre fiction will find Willow’s re-do list a genuinely engaging frame. Listeners who dislike military subplots in romances should know one is present here, though not dominant, and one reviewer specifically flagged it as a drawback for their particular tastes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this part of a series, or can it be listened to as a standalone?
It stands alone completely. Deacon appears as a secondary character in Denise Williams’s earlier novel Just My Luck, but you do not need to have read that book to follow or enjoy The Re-Do List. All relevant backstory is provided within this volume.
How prominent is the military storyline?
The brother’s deployment provides the plot mechanism that puts Willow and Deacon together, and Deacon’s post-military identity is one of his two main character threads. It is not the dominant focus, but it is meaningfully present. One reviewer specifically noted they would not have chosen this book had they known about the military element.
Is the age gap between Willow and Deacon a significant part of the story?
Willow is 24. The exact gap is not specified in the synopsis, but it is present and has been flagged by at least one reviewer as something worth knowing before starting, particularly if age-gap dynamics are not to your taste.
Does Teddy Hamilton narrate from Willow’s perspective or alternate between characters?
The metadata credits Hamilton as the single narrator, and the novel appears to center on Willow’s experience. Hamilton’s performance is described as likable and smooth, though some reviewers feel the romantic chemistry is better suggested in the writing than it is conveyed through the audio.
