Only You is a somewhat confusing but still enjoyable look at a classic romancelandia trope: the hero and heroine of the book share past lives. Most of the story works, but sometimes it becomes dizzying separating one character from another, making the book a slog. It’s fun but flawed.

Danielle “Dani” Richardson is a Howard University student disturbed by what she believes to be migraines which cause déjà vu among other symptoms. One day she encounters a mysterious musician named Stephen Jones at one of her lectures and feels dizzy and faint. Afterward, she realizes she can speak and understand French – which she could not do before. She eventually connects her experience to hearing the voice of Stephen. She and Stephen both come to realize the uneasy feeling that they know one another is understandable – because in several past lives, they were star-crossed lovers.

In the late 1890s Paris, they were Sabine and Damian. In 1915 London, they were Sarah and David. In 1946 Detroit, they were Demir and Selene. Besides the repeating initials of S and D, all of their previous romances share one unfortunate feature – the love tangles have ended with breakups or worse. Dani and Stephen team up to untangle the mess of their previous lives and find out if they have a future together – and if soulmates truly do exist in this world.

Only You has a charming narrative voice, and at least two of those pasts – Demir and Selene’s world and Sabine and Damian’s – are well-researched and thought-out peeks into the past. The big problem with the book is that we’re initially simply given the Sabine and Damian timeline alongside the Stephen and Dani one. That’s fine, but then two more timelines are thrown at the reader at the halfway point. We get very little time to bond with Demir and Selene, and the single chapter Sarah and David get shows the caprice of space and time but doesn’t really serve a full narrative point. Perhaps if Daniels had just pared everything down to just Sabine and Damian and Dani and Stephen, the narrative would have worked better, but as is too much is too much.

The romance here is interesting; each connection between the various S and D characters takes on a different sort of feeling, from the restrained passion of Sabine and Damian to the bare-bones honesty of Demir and Selene. But it screams out for a little something more, a little extra push. It’s a romance that’s lovely in many ways, but it just can’t quite get over the narrative humps in front of it. In the end, Only You is a good, though not great, experience that ends up a decent though not wholly satisfactory way to spend an afternoon.