I Think They Love You — Cover to Cover
Author: Julian Winters
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Pages: 336
Review Type: Cover to Cover
SJR Quick Take
⭐ Overall Rating: 5/5
🌶️ Spice: 3/5
💔 Emotional Impact: 5/5
🔁 Would I Read Again? Absolutely
❤️ Would I Recommend It? Yes
SPOILER WARNING: This is my Cover to Cover discussion of I Think They Love You. We are talking about everything—the relationships, family drama, CEO competition, Denz and Braylon, and the ending. If you haven’t finished the book yet, go read my Spoiler-Free Review first!
My Overall Thoughts
I gave I Think They Love You 5/5 stars, with a 3/5 for spice and a 5/5 for emotional impact.
I loved the characters, the family drama, the humor, the group chats, the rom-com references, and especially getting to watch Denz figure out what he actually wants for himself.
Underneath the fake dating and second-chance romance, there’s a much bigger conversation happening about family expectations, being Black, success, relationships, respecting your elders, communication, and what happens when everybody has an opinion about what your life should look like.
And Denz?
Sir.
We need to talk.
Then: Denz and Bray
I loved how the book opens with Denz and Bray going to meet Denz’s family. Denz is freaking out. He loves Bray, and meeting his family is a BIG deal. He’s even been thinking about proposing. He knows he may not be 100% ready for that yet, but he dreams about it. That opening becomes so important once we jump five years into the present because now we know how much Bray actually meant to Denz. This wasn’t some little college relationship that ended and Denz couldn’t get over it. He loved him. And then Bray left.
Five Years Later
Now Denz is a guy in his twenties trying to figure life out while working for his family’s event-planning company, 24 Carter Gold.
We meet Kenneth (Dad), Leena (Mom), Kami (older sister), Nic (younger sister), Jordan (cousin), Auntie Cheryl, and Auntie Eva as we get deeper into this big family. And even though Denz works for family, nobody is letting him slide because he’s Kenneth’s son. They expect him to put the work in and show up hell or high water.
Denz forgets about a meeting and forgets to bring the muffins, which starts showing us one of his problems.
He is BAD at keeping track of things. This man uses Post-it notes for everything.
And this is just my opinion, but... WHY DOESN’T THIS MAN USE THE REMINDERS OR CALENDAR ON HIS PHONE?! Sir. The technology is RIGHT THERE. But I did like that Denz doesn’t try to put his mistake on somebody else. He goes to get the muffins himself.
And BAM. There’s Bray. Except now he goes by Braylon.
Denz is completely thrown off. They exchange some words, Denz says some things he regrets, and then basically runs away from the situation. But he doesn’t have much time to process any of that because he gets back to another surprise. Kenneth is retiring.
The CEO Competition
Kenneth announces that the CEO position may eventually be opened to anyone, but he’s starting with the family first. Kami is ALL IN. Denz isn’t sure.
But then he starts thinking about all those times he watched his dad work when he was younger and how much he loved being part of everything. He starts imagining himself doing the same thing. Auntie Cheryl puts her support behind Kami while Auntie Eva backs Denz. But during the conversation, they start talking about whether either sibling is really prepared for the position. Kami is a single mother. Denz can’t keep a steady relationship. And I had a problem with that.
Because what does either one automatically have to do with whether somebody can run the company?
Kami also makes the point that becoming CEO is her dream, while for Denz it may be more of a fantasy. Can he actually hold everything together? That makes Denz angry and frustrated because he’s already heard some of what his aunties really think about him and Kami becoming CEO.
Denz wants his family to believe in him. And that’s when he makes a mistake. He lies. He tells Kami he’s seeing somebody. And... Oops. Auntie Cheryl heard him.
The Black Family Grapevine Has Entered the Chat
One of my FAVORITE things about this book is the family group chat. Between chapters, we get to see the family talking, gossiping, asking questions and being all up in everybody’s business. You can tell who’s older, who’s younger, and everybody has something to say. Denz tells one little lie and Auntie Cheryl sends that information straight down the family grapevine. Now everybody wants to meet his mystery boyfriend.
Meanwhile, Kami is secretly seeing someone herself. And Denz respects why she’s keeping it secret because he knows exactly what their family would do. They’re currently doing it to him. His parents demand a meet-and-greet. Jamie, Denz’s longtime best friend and roommate, is supposed to help him out. Jamie doesn’t show. But guess who comes walking down the street?
Braylon. And just like that, Braylon gets dragged into this fake-dating mess.
So...We’re Fake Dating the Ex
Braylon actually has a reason to go along with this. He works with Sky Is the Limit, a nonprofit, and wants a chance to meet with the mayor about getting funding.
Denz needs a boyfriend. Braylon needs access to the mayor. Fine. Let’s make some rules.
Rule 1: Pretend to date whenever they’re out in public.
Rule 2: End date is April 6.
Rule 3: Kissing with consent.
Rule 4: No sex.
Rule 5: No selfies, face pictures or tagging each other on social media.
Rule 6: Don’t tell anybody.
Rule 7: No dating while fake dating.
Mhm. I’m sure this is going to go perfectly.
Kenneth also announces that Denz will be in charge of the mayor’s Valentine’s party while Kami handles an engagement party. So now Denz is trying to win the CEO position, plan a major event, fake date his ex, deal with his family, and somehow prove to everybody that he can handle all of it.
What could go wrong?
Denz, Please Ask for Help
Denz makes a big slip-up while trying to juggle everything with the fake dating, including booking the venue for the mayor's party. Eventually he has to ask Auntie Cheryl for help. And he KNOWS this is going to cost him dearly. She helps him, but not before hitting him with: “You need Jesus.”
That line got me.
But underneath the humor, the family is really hard on Denz, especially Kenneth.
Denz and Kami even have a code word—“allergies”—for when the family has emotionally pushed or pulled them too much and they don’t want everybody knowing they’re crying.
And that says A LOT about this family.
What Really Happened Between Denz and Braylon?
The book slowly starts giving us more of the past while everything is happening in the present. We learn about the recent death of Braylon’s dad, the earlier loss of his mother, and why he now prefers going by Braylon. And we start getting more of the real story about what happened between him and Denz.
The first version we have is simple:
Braylon left Denz for a job and a life in London. Of course the family is side-eyeing him. I was side-eyeing him too! But we’re getting little pieces of then and now. Braylon actually got along with Denz’s family. He loved Kami and Nic, and the family did like him. But he wasn’t willing to change himself to fit into their perfect bubble of status.
Then graduation came.
Braylon had an opportunity to leave, and there was a conversation that Denz and Braylon desperately needed to have. Denz didn’t want to talk about it. He kept putting it off. Which is NEVER good when you have an important conversation hanging over your relationship. Braylon’s dad had even hinted about his son moving and asked Denz what his plans were for the future. But Denz couldn’t imagine leaving his family. Eventually Braylon left without saying goodbye.
Was that right? No.
But now I could see that the story wasn’t as simple as: Braylon abandoned Denz.
Denz had his part in what happened too.
Denz and Jamie
I also loved Denz’s friendship with Jamie.
They’ve been friends since they were kids, and Jamie, Denz and Jordan were inseparable. Now Denz and Jamie live together as friends and have Will Thacker Night, where they cuddle up and watch rom-coms because Jamie is bad at love and basically says: “I need to believe love is real.”
I loved that.
And Jamie has been acting a little strange. Denz notices. Jamie basically tells him to let it go. But Denz can’t.
Mhm. Because eventually we’re seeing there might be something happening between Jamie and Jordan.
The Rom-Com References
This book is FULL of rom-com references, which was another thing I loved.
I caught:
When Harry Met Sally
Notting Hill
Pretty Woman
While You Were Sleeping
The Wedding Date
The Proposal
My Best Friend’s Wedding
And we get references to classic rom-com moments too, including holding a boombox over your head outside your love’s bedroom window. ( Hint hint- the ending when Denz makes his rom-com moment with Braylon) The whole story has this love for rom-coms running through it, which makes what eventually happens with Denz trying to create his own big romantic moment even funnier.
The Rules Are Not Ruling Anymore
Eventually, Denz and Braylon start crossing some of those very carefully established boundaries. They have oral sex, and Denz is SHOOK. But then Denz notices something at Braylon’s house. His old sweatshirt. Braylon kept it. And now Denz’s head and heart are racing. He immediately needs to talk to Jamie because this is becoming more complicated than fake dating. Later, after more family drama surrounding Kami’s engagement party, Denz and Braylon end up drunk together at a fancy hotel.
Denz is kind of hoping they break some rules but isn’t sure where Braylon stands.
Well... We know what happens. They have sex.
And something I liked about this is that they’re not the same two people they were five years ago. They’ve both grown. They have different experiences, skills and preferences now, and that isn’t a bad thing.
But they also talk. They talk about life and work. They watch a rom-com. And Denz realizes he’s being more open with Braylon than he ever intended. He’s starting to fall again. But in the back of his mind, he keeps returning to the same thing:
Braylon left me. Something they desperately need to actually TALK about. And Denz still can’t do it.
The CEO Competition Starts Costing Them
The competition starts pushing Kami and Denz apart in a way they haven’t experienced before. Denz tries to apologize, but everyone is stressed. Then he realizes he made a menu mistake and Kami fixed it. Now the competition, sibling relationship and family expectations are all getting tangled together. And then we learn something important about Auntie Cheryl. She was basically forced to leave her husband because of the family. Now I’m looking at this family a little differently. Because these expectations didn’t begin with Kami and Denz. Other people have already been hurt by them.
Denz Is Trying to Be Superman
This man is running EVERYWHERE.
He’s trying to handle his event, win CEO, fake date Braylon, help Braylon with work, keep his family happy, compete with Kami and somehow keep everything together.
And he’s wearing himself down. Then Kenneth calls because the venue for the retirement party has flooded. Of course Denz jumps into action. He notices Kami isn’t there and that she sent her assistant instead. Denz is hurt. He’s angry. He feels betrayed. Then Kami finally tells him why.
Her son, Mikah, was sick.
She needed to make sure she had someone available to watch her son before she did anything else. Because her child comes first. That becomes REALLY important later.
But Denz has been so busy running around trying to fix everything that he forgets about his promise to Braylon. By the time he realizes it, he’s too late. Whitley, Braylon’s protective coworker, is furious with Denz.
Denz tries explaining everything to Braylon and basically word-vomits all his feelings and emotions. Now Braylon is angry too. And he tells Denz something he really needs to hear. Denz is doing all of this for his family. At some point, he needs to decide what’s actually important to him.
“Denz’s Stomach Freefalls Into His Ass.”
I have to stop here because this sentence cracked me up.
“Denz’s stomach freefalls into his ass.” That’s it. That’s the note. Moving on.
The Retirement Party
By the time we get to Kenneth’s retirement party, Denz is worn down. He’s barely talking to Kami. He doesn’t know if Braylon is going to show up. But he puts on his game face and makes sure everything is ready. Braylon does show. And eventually he spills his feelings and emotions. He even checks Auntie Cheryl. But he can’t keep doing this with Denz. So he leaves.
Again. And Denz is crushed because from his perspective, the exact thing he was terrified of has happened all over again. Leena has to help him through his breakdown, and we learn she’s also been helping Kami.
And this made me ask:
Why did Mom and Dad let things get THIS bad?
I know family can be tough, but both of your children are breaking down emotionally during this competition. At what point do Kenneth and Leena step in and say: Okay. We have a problem.
Kami Wins
Kami wins the CEO position.
After everything Kenneth explains why, I understood his decision.
Kami had a sick child. She didn’t ignore her son to prove she could handle everything. She made sure he was taken care of and delegated the work to someone she trusted. That’s what a CEO does.
Meanwhile, Denz had been blowing off meals, friends, family, promises to Braylon and his own needs because he thought being capable meant doing everything himself. Kami knew how to prioritize and delegate. Denz was running himself into the ground. And that distinction matters. Kenneth did not want that for his son.
Kenneth’s Side—and the Pressure of Being Black
We finally hear more from Kenneth about why he has been so hard on his children. He talks about how his own work nearly cost him his marriage to Leena because he was constantly working and away from home. And he talks about being Black. Kenneth believes his children have to be better and do better because they’re Black, and especially because Denz is a Black man.
And the difficult part is...
He’s not completely wrong.
Look at society.
There are absolutely situations where Black people are expected to show that we’re two or three times better before we’re given the same respect or opportunities.
But that pressure doesn’t disappear when you get home. Sometimes it follows you right through the front door. And that’s something I really connected with in this book.
Black Family Expectations
This is one of the biggest conversations I wanted to have after finishing the book. There can be so many expectations around what you do, how successful you are, how you act, who you date, and who you bring around your family.
Did you ever worry about bringing certain people around your family?
Because I most certainly did. I only brought around the people I knew I could trust, which weren’t many. At one point my family thought I was a lesbian. But there was a reason I was selective.
And this book made me think about that. There’s also this expectation in some Black families that you respect your elders.
But what happens when an elder isn’t respecting you? What happens when advice turns into control? What happens when everybody thinks loving you gives them a vote in your life?
That’s what I kept thinking about with Denz, Kami, and even Auntie Cheryl. Cheryl’s story shows that these expectations have already affected another generation. And now they’re trickling down.
Kami, Being a Single Mother & Success
I also want to talk about Kami being a single mother because the family specifically brings that up when discussing whether she’s capable of becoming CEO.
Why should being a single mother automatically count against her?
Especially when, by the end, we see that being a mother is part of what demonstrates that she can prioritize. Her son needed her. She took care of him. She delegated. The work still got done. And she is also in a serious relationship. I've always said the Black woman is the hardest-working woman, and it is hard to be soft with so many expectations—not just from society, but from family too.
I’m glad she got the position.
Respect, Boundaries & Therapy
And while we’re talking about this family...
THERAPY.
Because everybody clearly loves each other. That’s never really the problem. The problem is that love doesn’t automatically mean healthy communication. Denz and Kami have literally created the code word “allergies” because they’re overwhelmed and crying but don’t want the family to know.
Denz avoids difficult conversations. He runs or lies, which we see throughout the entire story.
Braylon leaves instead of properly saying goodbye and has built up walls as a result of losing both of his parents.Kenneth puts enormous pressure on his children because of what he experienced. Everybody is carrying something. Therapy isn’t about saying this is a bad family.
It’s about recognizing that people can love each other and STILL need help figuring out boundaries, communication, and the things they’ve passed down.
“Home Is Where You Want to Be.”
Braylon says: “Home is where you want to be.” And I think that's what Denz needs to figure out.
For most of the book, Denz is thinking about what everybody else wants. What Kenneth wants. What the family expects. What a Carter is supposed to do. What a CEO is supposed to look like. What everybody thinks his relationship should look like.
But what does Denz want?
That’s what he finally has to figure out.
GO GET YOUR MAN
Eventually, Kami and everybody else are basically looking at Denz like:
WTF ARE YOU DOING? GO GET YOUR MAN.
So Kami decides he’s going to have his giant rom-com moment.
After ALL those rom-com references...
Surely this is going to be perfect. Nope.
His big romantic moment does not go according to plan. But that’s okay because Denz finally does what he has struggled to do throughout this entire book.
He talks. He tells Braylon everything. His feelings. His emotions. What he wants. And he confirms that he’s going to do his own thing and figure out who he is and what he wants for himself. And he wants Braylon beside him wherever he goes. For once, Denz follows his heart.
Where We Leave Everyone
Kami has the CEO position and is happy with Suraj and her son. Denz has Braylon. Jamie and Jordan have their own situation going on. The company is doing well. And Denz didn’t need to become CEO to prove that he was successful. He has his social media following and can easily turn that into a career. He needed to figure out what success actually looked like for him.
Writing Style
One of the things I loved about Julian Winters’s writing was the way we moved between then and the present.
We didn’t get the entire story of Denz and Braylon’s breakup dumped on us at once. We got pieces of their past while watching their relationship develop again in the present. That worked for me because my feelings about what happened changed as I learned more.
At first, I’m looking at Braylon like:
You left him?!
But then we get more information. We see Denz’s part in what happened. We see what Braylon was dealing with. And we see how both of them have changed. The story also moved quickly for me because there was always something happening between the family, the group chats, the events, Kami and Denz’s competition, and Denz and Braylon.
All of those things trickled down into the conclusion of Denz finally following his heart instead of doing what everybody else expected him to do.
Romance, Chemistry & Spice
I’m keeping my 3/5 spice rating.
There are open-door sexual scenes, including oral sex and sex between Denz and Braylon, so this definitely isn’t a closed-door romance. But the sexual relationship never took over the entire story for me. There was so much happening outside of sex—the family, CEO competition, their history, work, grief, communication, and figuring out what they actually wanted—that the spice felt like part of their relationship rather than the whole relationship.
And I liked seeing that these weren’t exactly the same two people who dated five years ago. They’ve grown. They’ve learned things. Their preferences have changed. And now they’re learning each other again.
🌶️ Spice: 3/5
Emotional Impact
I’m giving the emotional impact a 5/5.
This book almost made me cry, but it was more than just one emotional moment that got me. It was watching Denz wear himself down trying to be everything for everybody. Watching Denz and Kami’s relationship get pulled apart when they’ve always been so close. Learning more about Kenneth and why he was so hard on his children. Watching Denz finally crack under everything he’d been carrying.
And then there is everything between Denz and Braylon—their history, Braylon’s grief, Denz’s fear of being left again, and both of them still carrying things from a relationship that ended five years ago without the conversation they really needed.
There’s a lot of humor in this book, but underneath it is a family full of people who genuinely love each other and don’t always know how to communicate that love in the healthiest way.
By the time Denz finally realizes that he has to decide what he wants for his own life, all of those smaller emotional moments have built into something much bigger.
Yeah.
This one got me.
💔 Emotional Impact: 5/5
What Worked for Me
The characters and family dynamics were probably my favorite part.
I loved the group chats. I loved Denz and Jamie’s friendship. I loved watching my opinion of Braylon change as we learned the full story. I loved the rom-com references. I loved the humor mixed into the heavier conversations. And I really liked that Kami and Denz’s CEO competition wasn’t just about finding out who won. It forced Denz to finally ask whether becoming CEO was something he actually wanted.
What Didn’t Work for Me
My biggest frustration was communication. There were so many moments when I wanted these people to just TALK. Denz and Braylon needed to talk before Braylon ever left for London. Denz needed to stop avoiding what happened. The family needed better boundaries. Kenneth and Leena needed to recognize what the competition was doing to their children sooner. And Denz...
USE YOUR PHONE CALENDAR. Please.
Final Thoughts
I Think They Love You stayed a 5/5 for me after going Cover to Cover.
I came for the fake dating and second-chance romance, but I stayed invested because of Denz, Braylon, Kami, Jamie, the family drama, the group chats and all of the bigger conversations happening underneath the romance.
For me, this became a story about family, expectations, communication, being Black, and learning that loving your family doesn’t mean they get to decide what your life should look like.
Denz spends so much time trying to prove that he’s capable of becoming the person everybody expects him to be.
By the end, he’s finally figuring out who he wants to be.
And I’m glad he got his man too.
SJR Final Rating
⭐ Overall Rating: 5/5
🌶️ Spice: 3/5
💔 Emotional Impact: 5/5
🔁 Would I Read It Again? Absolutely.
📚 Would I Recommend It? Yes.
“Home is where you want to be.” — Braylon
Until the next chapter,
Happy Reading,
S. J. Robinson
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