Book Review: Falling Like Leaves

 

It’s currently September as I’m writing this review and you can definitely feel the cool winds of Fall slowly flowing through.  I love Fall, it’s honestly my favourite season of the year based on the seasonal events like Fall Harvest and Halloween and the general vibe it brings.  The changing of the leaves gives everything a somber orange tone that allows us to celebrate the end of Summer and the slow approach of Winter.  It’s clear I’m not alone in this adoration either, a lot of people seem to like Fall for it’s general cozy vibe, so it felt appropriate to dive into a book Fall-themed as the season gets underway.

Falling Like Leaves is the 2^nd official novel released by Ohio-based author Misty Wilson.  Its central narrative follows Ellis Mitchell, a 17-year-old girl based in New York city with her mum and dad.  Ellis has lived her life so far with the intention of honoring her fathers wishes.  Working as an intern in her dad’s media business, Ellis is working extra hard to build herself among her father’s contacts all the while studying hard to apply for a place on Columbia’s journalism course.  Despite having her entire life planned out, Ellis clearly has a creative aspiration she’s putting on the back burner in her fashion design skillset.  When her parents announce they’re taking a small break from one another, Ellis is surprised to find out she’s being taken down to her mother’s home town of Bramble Falls, Connecticut. Upset about being uprooted from her perfectly-planned life, Ellis is initially reluctant to appreciate the small town’s Fall celebrations; it’s only when she meets Cooper Barnett in the local cat café that she learns to settle into the environment.  The rest of the narrative follows Ellis and Cooper’s romantic relationship develop over the course of the town’s seasonal activities as Ellis struggles with realizing if the life she initially planned was truly the life she wants.

As far as romance novels go, Falling Like Leaves is filled with a lot of the common tropes you’ll find in most hallmark stories.  It’s the central character returning to a home town and learning to appreciate an element of life they forgot through their dedication to their job while simultaneously falling in love with a person from their past.  It’s such an overused setup at this point that it’s become a joke.  I will give Misty Wilson credit though, while she makes no qualms about utilizing this trope, she does put enough effort to giving the story a unique sense of depth to make it compelling to read. The Fall-vibe is constant in this book and there’s a clear effort to make the town and season feel like a character all of itself.  I also think the dynamic between Cooper and Ellis is actually well defined as they feel well-written as people with genuine real-life issues.  It’s a story wish proudly celebrates its tropes but does enough to define itself outside of them, which is very rare in the romance genre.

It's a well paced book, only standing at around 320 pages so you never feel the story drag as it runs at a fairly consistent stride. Tonally though, I do feel the story dives too much into the cozy vibe that it’s jokes and dialogue feel a bit restrained.  The characters all interact with one another in this overly positive sense and whatever tension arrives in the story dissipates all too quickly before it goes back to being a cozy-coded story.  It’s a shame too because Misty Wilson clearly goes out of her way to add a lot of real-life depth to the characters but she diminishes the quality of it’s output by keeping the dialogue overly cozy and unrealistic.

I can’t get too upset at the fact a cozy-themed book is overly cozy though as that’s clearly what this book’s primary intention was to be.  Falling Like Leaves is one of the better tropey romance books I’ve read as of late.  It’s still guilty of a lot of the common issues these stories generate but I do get a general impression Misty Wilson wanted to define the story outside of those tropes somewhat which you do notice all throughout.  If you like your romance stories and the Fall season, Falling Like Leaves will definitely tick a lot of boxes for you as it did me.