K. Ryan - Finding Emma

For the last year, Emma Owens has been quietly detached from everything and everyone. Desperate to escape the demons that chased her out of her hometown, she’s learned that life here in Milwaukee is just less complicated and less tragic when it’s a one-woman show.
In the span of one week, everything about her carefully orchestrated solitude comes crashing down. Then again, she can’t really ignore the scratching coming from her patio door or the hungry, pleading grey eyes reflecting in the moonlight. Those four little white paws and that tiger-striped fur thaws some of the ice keeping her heart on lockdown and she’s attached before she knows what hits her.
Emma doesn’t have any better luck ignoring another pair of eyes, and her new neighbor, Finn Matthews, with his shy persistence and a painful past of his own, slowly chips away at the rest of the ice trapping Emma in her insecurities and her loneliness. 
Taking a chance on her new roommate and her next-door neighbor opens a door she’d previously slammed shut: the door to a new lease on life and the right to forgive, to fight back, and to heal.
And the craziest part about it?
It all started with a stray cat.
She was lost...and he found her. 

Comment: I got interested in this book after reading a comment about it somewhere. I had never heard of the author, so this was a new experience for me. The book was interesting, the characters and the main theme well designed but the overall effect wasn't as well achieved as I would expect.

In this story we have the tale of Emma Owens, a young woman who has had some terrible events in her past and as a means to cope, she run away to a bigger city where no one knows her and where she can escape the pressure.

One day the apartment next to hers is finally occupied and the new neighbors seem to be friendly, especially one of them, Finn, who is also shy but with whom Emma feels an affinity with.

As they get to know one another, Emma slowly starts to share things until the whole truth comes out about her. Will Emma be able to trust Finn and fight for her right to have a life out of fear and hiding?

This was an interesting book. Part of its main theme is a secret until a certain stage of the story but I can say it's related to social media and how strongly they affect people's lives nowadays.

I liked this story well enough. Once again, following a certain trend seen lately in romances, this is a first person narrator. I've said before it's my opinion this technique is difficult to accomplish well and it's also so limitative to what the reader is able to know... in thrillers,certain situations benefit from having just one POV, so the suspense can be bigger.

In romance, however, it's not as easy to portray such a compelling character to the point nothing else matters. I can see the goal here but for me, just having Emma's thoughts - and two or three chapters from Finn's - isn't as thrilling as it could be and not even the part where she finally changes her way of thinking into healing and the final chapters made me like her better.

The progress of this story has a good pace. I liked that Emma and Finn's relationship doesn't happen too quickly and intertwined with Emma's doubts about going out in public in social environments is quite well done, the self doubt, the little angst associated with this felt realistic.

Still, for someone with Emma's feelings of anxiety which she describes often, I keep thinking that she started to trust a little too quickly in Finn. I can understand the appeal of someone who is attracted to her, whom she sees as in need of a new start like she is but considering what happened to her, I'd stuck to my shyness a little more.

Of course, this doesn't mean I didn't appreciate the fact Emma was able to learn she shouldn't hide from her problems and I was very sympathetic to the fear she faced and the sadness over how everyone close to her reacted in the past. 

In these days, there are more and more tools for people to make their rights asserted in the terms of the law and Emma certainly wanted a change enough to use them. It's also obvious that for Emma, this was mostly an emotional lesson rather than a civil rights one but it was good how the author blended them.

There are other themes included in this plot, like Finn's brewery business with his family, the love for sports they had, the love both Finn and Emma had for music and how many songs the author included in the story as a sort of soundtrack for what was happening though the novel. The author did a god job mixing all these things together and the final message is a good one but overall, I struggled a little bit to really love this, to like Emma as a narrator and I think the story could have been a lot more emotional and heartfelt.

There's a cat, though, and the scenes with him were cute.

Grade: 6/10