About The Author
Amazon Summary
Boston, 1984. A party Jim Garraty never wanted to attend. A girl who didn’t look away. A night stitched together by mixtapes, quiet courage, and the ache of choosing to stay.
Jim isn’t chasing romance—he’s just trying to outrun the noise. But when Kelly Moore enters the room with her drink, her Rachmaninoff references, and her uncanny ability to see without pressing, everything shifts. Over cassette tapes and Heineken beer, conversations deepen, touch becomes language, and for the first time, intimacy feels less like performance and more like breath.
Comings and Goings – The Art of Being Seen is a quietly luminous companion to the Reunion Duology, capturing one night’s transformation from awkward beginnings to the kind of closeness that rewrites your inner dialogue. It’s about music, memory, and the rare kindness of someone meeting you where you are—with patience, humor, and unexpected grace.
This isn’t a story about first love.
It’s a story about the first time you didn’t have to explain yourself.
My Review Of Comings and Goings- The Art of Being Seen By Alex Diaz-Granados
Comings and Goings- The Art of Being Seen by Alex Diaz-Granados is a short story about the night Jim Garraty and Kelly Moore met. If the names of the characters sound familiar it’s because Jim Garraty is the lead character in the Reunion Duology. Both of which I have reviewed on this blog before.
Characters
I’ve said this before on my prior reviews of the authors books (read them here) but I’ll say it again on this one. Alex Diaz-Granados has a real talent for making characters that are extremely realistic. They don’t feel like two dimensional characters on paper when you read them. They feel like real people that you can connect with.
Both Jim Garraty and Kelly Moore are characters that are easy to like and enjoy reading about. And they have a wonderful chemistry all throughout the book. For the moment at least, they are exactly what the other needs and years for.
Plot
We have read about Jim Garraty’s experience during high school and after college. But this book focuses on his experience after first finishing high school and moving to a new place for college. The feelings of loneliness, experiencing a lot of change all at once and finding oneself is something a lot of us go through in that phase of life when we’re still very young adults. Garraty’s character perfectly encompasses that.
When he attends a party he wasn’t excited about going to, he meets Kelly Moore. They instantly feel a connection between them. As the summary mentions, it’s not love. And I’ll say that this book isn’t a romance, at least not to me. It more about human connection and meeting the right person at the right time.
Jim finds himself with Kelly at her place and through deeper conversations they begin to understand one another and do something I find beautiful, they allow one another to be their authentic self. Neither feels pressured to be someone else. They connect exactly as they are. I particularly enjoyed how Kelly was patient with Jim, not leading him but rather being beside him through it all.
Overall
As I mentioned, this book isn’t about love or the kind of connection that makes you want to spend your life with someone. Of course, Jim and Kelly will remember the night they spent together. But they will think of it as finding what they needed in that moment so that they could have the strength to continue on and move forward with their lives.
I would highly recommend reading Comings and Goings. It’s a fantastic book that I think most readers would enjoy. But I would really recommend reading the Reunion Duology first to properly understand the characters, particularly that of Jim Garraty.
You can purchase Comings and Goings- The Art of Being Seen by Alex Diaz-Granados on Amazon.
You can also find his website/blog here.
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