A ghost is sitting across the table begging for a favour. If Clarke Cartwright puts a coat over her head and speaks a secret aloud, Earnest gets one hour with Adeline Bennett, who froze to death in 1957 waiting at the river for him to arrive. He asks nearly every day. She has been doing it for years, and she is running out of secrets, and she does it anyway because he is family and because he is very good at ghost guilt. Free Falling by Lyla Sage opens on that small, absurd, oddly moving transaction, and it tells you almost everything about its heroine: she will give anyone anything, and nobody has ever thought to ask what it costs her.
Lyla Sage Writes a Letter First
There is a note to the reader before chapter one, and a group should read it out loud before discussing anything else. Sage says she is low at the moment and that her heroine is too. She had already written a novel about depression years ago, and it still slipped past her when it came round again, because nothing dramatic happened. She got tired. Then the routines she relied on gave way.
That letter reframes everything after it. Free Falling by Lyla Sage is packaged as a comedy about a fake engagement and is actually a study of a collapse that nobody around the sufferer can see, because the sufferer keeps functioning. Clarke rises early, opens the shop, clears the inbox, charms an entire town, and then lies awake beneath the plastic stars she glued to her ceiling as a child, because she cannot make her own head go quiet.
Free Falling Ties the Magic to the Illness
The structural idea is what lifts this above the shelf it sits on. Both Cartwright twins speak with the dead, and they do it differently. Collins receives a single voice, conversational, manageable. Clarke receives interference: a whine, a drone, a crowd noise that thickens with every additional spirit nearby. She has turned muffling it into a craft, and she governs her contact with the dead by a code she treats as structural.
Her migraines, though, do not come from the hearing. They come from the muffling. She shoves, the dead shove harder, and she loses consciousness for it. This goes unsaid almost to the end, and when her sister finally names it, the sentence has nothing to do with the paranormal at all: she cannot fathom why Clarke keeps looking for worth in her own suffering instead of in anything that might make her happy.
Put like that, one mechanism is driving both the haunting and the illness, so there is nothing to be cured, only something to be renegotiated. By the last pages Free Falling by Lyla Sage has given Clarke no deliverance whatsoever. She has a therapist reachable only by video from two hours off, a label she does not want, and the option of taking her weight off a door she has been holding closed for thirty years.
The Romance Is Better Than the Plot
Leith Wilkes loves being a farmer and hates owning a farm, talks without stopping because quiet unnerves him, and has been half in love with Clarke since primary school without ever once suspecting it was mutual. He is a genuinely well-made romance hero, and the reason is his father.
Their last conversation was a shouting match in which Leith told the man that if he died tomorrow, the farm would be run into the ground out of spite. He died the next day. Five years on, Leith still cannot call what he carries sadness, because it is fury, and the fury shames him. Clarke gives him the best sentence in Free Falling by Lyla Sage in reply: mourning does not have to be gentle and wistful, and sometimes it shows up ready to swing.
Set against that, the machinery of Free Falling by Lyla Sage is silly. An inheritance clause that requires a marriage, a five-year countdown, a bought lawyer, a forged certificate to steal a day, and then an obscure subsection nobody had bothered to read. The antagonists are drawn in crayon: a cousin who spits tobacco and calls the land his gold mine, a developer described as looking like a Bond villain who appears once and is later dismissed by letter. Worse, the crisis is resolved by someone other than the two protagonists, arriving late and from offstage, which leaves the couple watching their own climax. The clever part, at least, is what the solution actually is: an application to have the whole property declared historically significant, which is a far more interesting way out of a marriage-of-convenience plot than a wedding.
For the Group
- Being liked versus being known. Clarke suspects she is too likeable to be lovable: that she has curated a has-it-all-together personality so thoroughly there is nothing underneath for anyone to fall for. Is she wrong? Does the novel disprove it or simply reassure her?
- “People like me because they don’t have to worry about me.” She says this as an explanation for having nobody to call. Whose failure is that in your group’s reading, hers or everyone else’s?
- The ex gets a scene. Ali arrives expecting to be cast as the wronged woman and declines the role, refusing to be pitted against Clarke over a man. Discuss what it does to the book that she is allowed to be decent.
- Suppression as self-harm. The argument running under Free Falling by Lyla Sage is that the thing damaging Clarke is her own management of herself. How far does that hold once you take the ghosts away?
- A diagnosis instead of a cure. The epilogue deliberately leaves her unwell on some days. Is that braver than a recovery, or does it let the novel off the hook?
- Content notes before you choose it: depression and exhaustion written from within, including a moment where she stops minding whether she goes over the edge; fainting from pain more than once; bereavement; a son whose last words to his father were cruel and who lost him the following day; a man who intimidates the teenage daughter he abandoned; several explicit bedroom scenes; a burglary; alcohol, including a spiked punch bowl at a school dance.
Groups who want the full picture should start with Soul Searching, the first Sweetwater Peak book, since Collins, Brady and the developer all originate there. Swift and Saddled is the earlier novel Sage refers to in her author’s note, and reading the two together makes a genuinely rich discussion about an author returning to the same subject years apart. Wild and Wrangled has her most satisfying central couple, and Done and Dusted is where all of it began.
Where It Leaves You
The plot of Free Falling by Lyla Sage is held together with string, and a group will spend ten minutes happily taking it apart. Then somebody will mention the ending and the tone will change, because the last thing Clarke does is not accept a proposal or save a farm.
It is to turn to the ghost who has been quietly sharing her house for years, the one she has never spoken to because speaking to her would mean admitting she could hear her, and ask the woman her name.
Her name is Betty. That is the book: not a rescue, not a cure, just somebody finally stopping long enough to ask. For a novel that arrives packaged as a fake-dating romp, it is a remarkably kind thing to have been building toward all along.
