Until You by Briar Prescott

Narrated by Devon Ryder

I read Until You when it came out earlier this year and it was clear almost from the beginning that it was going to be on my Best of 2023 list. It’s a funny, heartfelt and deeply touching slow-burn romance about a young man whose life is upended after he learns it has been built upon a lie, and I was excited when I learned it would be making its way into audio. I’m always apprehensive when unknown narrators are attached to books I love; Devon Ryder has only five titles listed at Audible at time of writing, and while he doesn’t do a bad job overall, his inexperience shows at times, and I couldn’t help wondering what Cooper North or Nick J. Russo would have made of this wonderful story.

A lifetime spent moving around almost constantly means seventeen-year-old Jude has never had the chance to put down roots or make any real friends. His parents have promised him that there will be no more moves before he leaves for college in a year, so when he overhears them talking about moving on again one night, he’s confused and upset. He loves them dearly and knows they love him in return, but he’s never understood their wanderlust; he’s trying to decide whether to confront them or not when some of the other things they’ve said properly register and he starts to wonder if perhaps he might be adopted. When he talks to his two besties – Steph and Blair – about it, they suggest he should get a DNA test kit and find out one way or the other.

The story then moves forward a few years, and we find Jude, aged twenty-five, living and working in New York City. He does lots of temporary jobs – bartending, waiting tables, food delivery, working at a sandwich shop – it’s all a bit crazy, but the whole no ties, no strings thing is how he likes it and intends to keep it. That’s true for his personal life, too – casual hook-ups are fun and scratch an itch and best of all, they’re safe. If he doesn’t let anybody get close, they can’t hurt him.

The night Jude’s life changes again is nothing out of the ordinary. At a party, he’s feeling a bit hemmed in and swipes a bottle from the bar before heading up to the roof for a bit of quiet, intent on a party for one… except another guy seems to have had the same idea, but accidentally kicks the door shut and locks them out. Oops. Blake is drop-dead gorgeous, so Jude doesn’t exactly object to the company, and he quickly shows himself more than up to Jude’s weight in the snarking department. They banter back-and-forth and Jude even finds himself talking about himself a little – not something he does often (if ever); there’s definitely more than a spark or two of attraction zinging between them, but Jude’s hopes of a hot, sweaty night are dashed when Blake says outright that he isn’t going to sleep with him. Before things can get too awkward, the door crashes open and they’re ordered off the roof, which is probably for the best. Jude was starting to actually like Blake and to like who he was around a genuinely nice man – and he doesn’t do that.

When Jude gets home, he’s distraught to realise he’s lost his watch. He panics – it was a gift from his father and it’s irreplaceable; he looks everywhere he can think of and even goes back to the club where the party was, but he’s out of luck. It’s gone. Miserably, he resigns himself to the loss – but then gets a phone call from an unknown number; it’s Blake, telling him he found a watch with a phone number on the strap.

When Jude and Blake meet the next day to reunite Jude with his watch, it’s the start of something special. Over the following weeks, the two men fall into an easy friendship; Jude flirts outrageously, Blake affectionately shoots him down, they message each other all the time to talk about nothing in particular, they share meals, they hang out and Jude introduces Blake to his favourite terrible sci-fi movies… Blake is still adamant that sex is off the table, but that begins to matter less and less to Jude as time passes, and he realises – to his surprise – that whatever it is he’s doing with Blake he likes it a lot. He likes Blake a lot, and for the first time in years, Jude is forced to admit that his self-imposed no-strings existence isn’t what he really wants any more, that he wants to love and be loved, to feel as though he really belongs again.

Jude’s conflicting emotions – happiness at being around Blake, fear and anxiety that loving someone will open up the possibility for pain and loss – are superbly articulated and he has many doubts and insecurities to overcome along the way. But what I really, absolutely loved is his willingness to face all that head on – and fall hard for Blake anyway. He has the strength to admit that what he’s been doing – temporary jobs, temporary lovers, no plans, no ambitions – isn’t working for him, and to decide – for his own sake – to make a change, even though it will mean lowering the protective walls he’s maintained for so long.

Their relationship is superbly written, full of affection, sizzling chemistry and spectactularly good banter, and although the story is told entirely in Jude’s PoV (for reasons which become apparent later on), Ms. Prescott does a good job of fleshing out Blake, showing the growth of his feelings for Jude and that there’s more to his easy-going persona than meets the eye.

So many romances employ a third-act break up for reasons that are either tenuous or ridiculous, but that’s not the case here. The reasons that led to Jude becoming the closed-off and cynical man he is when we meet him in the story proper are not revealed straight away; instead the author drip-feeds them through the story dropping clues as she slowly draws us into Jude’s life and lets us get to know him. We know he’s been badly hurt and that whatever happened to him has made it hard for him to trust and made him wary of anything beyond the superficial. The reveal is a shocker – it will punch you in the feels and your heart will break for Jude and Blake even as you’re rooting for them to find a way back to each other. (And that love letter – swoon!)

Devon Ryder is, as I said, new-to-me and appears to be fairly new to audiobook narration. He does a number of things very well and I enjoyed his performance overall; the pacing is fine, he captures Jude’s prickly, snarky, honest and deadpan manner perfectly and imbues his performance with a lot of nuance and emotion. In fact, there’s only one real problem, and that’s with his differentiation. In their first scene together, I had trouble telling Jude and Blake apart, and also, because we’re in Jude’s PoV the whole time, there needs to be a distinction between his speech and his thoughts, and there isn’t any, so there were times I thought he’d said something aloud when he hadn’t. As the story progresses, it becomes easier to distinguish between Jude and Blake’s dialogue and Blake’s voice becomes more distinctive, but the difference between them remains quite subtle. There isn’t a huge secondary cast – we meet Jude’s besties Steph (whose story is up next in And Then You) and Blair – and again, there’s not a lot of variety of tone or timbre to allow listeners to easily identify them. This is, however, one of those times where the things the narrator gets right were right enough for me to be able to enjoy the performance as a whole.

Until You is one of the best contemporary romances of 2023, and is head and shoulders above all but a handful of the others I’ve read/listened to this year. The characterisation is superb, the story is funny, sexy and heart-breaking, and the HEA is all the sweeter for being so hard-won. Devon Ryder is certainly a voice to ‘watch’ – he demonstrates that he is more than capable of handling the emotional demands of romance novels, and of providing the kind of nuanced performance romance listeners are looking for – I just wish he had a slightly bigger repertoire of vocal characterisations to draw from. Hopefully, that’s something that will come with more experience. In the meantime, I’m recommending Until You in audio because I did enjoy it, despite my reservations.

Caz

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Buy Until You by Briar Prescott on Amazon