Rating: 👍🏻

I needed a sweet and easy palate cleanser of a book and damn but Seen You Before by Hilly Keen delivered. It was everything I wanted in a novella: short (153 pages), well-written, funny, and reading it felt like a warm nap in the sun on a late spring day.

The tl;dr is that Joanie and Colin work in the same small town coworking space. She’s a romance author and he’s a freelance software engineer. She feels like she recognizes him from somewhere… and he desperately doesn’t want her to figure out where from. But deskmates turns to friends turns to lovers, and insert something about secrets making bad bedmates here (Joanie’s the author, not me).

Anyway, I loved that while this was an age-gap romance, Joanie was 32 to Colin’s 43. Having just read a novella with a similar age gap but the heroine being 18, it felt very refreshing to be personally close in age to Joanie… not to mention I definitely prefer books where the women aren’t just barely legal.

I also loved that Colin is described as having some cushion. Like yes, there are size differences at play because Joanie is petite and Colin is super tall and buff, but he also allows himself to enjoy life and I appreciated that in a genre where MMCs are so often super jacked.

What didn’t work as well for me is that I actually felt like the secret identity thing was a little overblown. Without spoiling it, I’ll just say that Joanie’s reaction felt a bit much given they’ve only been dating a few weeks when she finds out, and that’s a normal amount of time to be dating someone to still learn things about each other. Like yes, she doesn’t find out from him, but I still don’t understand why she was so upset.

All that said, this was so sweet and I can’t wait to read more of Hilly Keen’s backlist.