We are all found things by Molly O’Keefe| Book Review

My critique partners and I have been discussing writing shorter length stories, and basically wondering how the hell to do it. Squeezing in all the regular romance beats, along with character arcs, depth of emotion and all without resorting to instalove seems like an incredibly difficult feat to accomplish when you have less than 30,000 words to play with. So the three of us buddy read this, so we could study it, pull it apart and work out how the pro’s do it. And Molly O’Keefe is a pro. No doubt about that. I was blown away by how much detail she managed to squeeze into such a small book. Luka and Rennie jumped off the page from the very first sentence and drew me into their world. Rennie is an artist, welding being her choice of medium. She has a rented space in a shitty part of town that keeps getting broken into. The only solution is to find someone to live in the loft apartment over her workspace, who can call the cops when trouble arises. There’s an attraction from the minute she meets tall, blonde, Viking-ish Luka. He’s beautiful but awkward and she can’t work out how she knows him. It’s only after he moves in, that she realizes how she recognizes him and that she already knows the secret he’s keeping. In fact, the whole world knows his shameful secrets. There isn’t a ton of plot to the story, beyond them revealing their secrets to each other, but the need to know their secrets had me flipping pages. The ending snuck up on me, partly because it finished at 84% so it did feel like an abrupt ending, but it wasn’t entirely unsatisfying. Lukas secret is a good one, and explained his character. Rennie’s secret didn’t seem big enough for her behaviour and there were some little things that went unexplained. Which is the only reason I knocked off a star. Molly’s writing is beautiful and moving to the point of being poetic at times. I’d definitely read more of her work.