The pumpkin Ellis Mitchell chooses is the ugliest in the patch, covered in warts. By the end of the carving party in the town square, the stem has become a trunk and the warts the crown of an apple tree, and the boys around her are swearing in admiration. Then she is dared to carve a face. She picks Cooper Barnett, borrows a pumpkin with a large knob in the middle, and turns the knob into his nose, finishing it with two scraps of red-painted paper stuck in the nostrils. Nobody else at the table understands. Cooper laughs until he cries, because the day before her head had smashed into his face. Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson is full of moments like that one, private jokes that turn into proof of something neither character will say out loud.
The setup is classic. Ellis, a Manhattan senior with her eyes on Columbia, is moved to Bramble Falls, Connecticut, when her parents separate. Her mother’s sister runs the town. Cooper, her best friend from one summer three years ago, makes the coffee at the local cat café and would rather she had stayed away.
A Town That Runs on Festivals
The calendar is the plot. Bramble Falls fills every autumn weekend with an event, and Wilson uses them as chapters in a courtship: an apple-cider tea party in absurd donated dresses, a relay race with apple bobbing and a three-legged sprint that ends in a heap, a glow-stick game of hide and seek in the woods after dark, a drive-in horror double bill, and a corn maze with no phone signal. Each is staged with real comic timing. The relay alone, with Ellis tying a knot she learned in the Cub Scouts and then tripping both of them anyway, is worth the price of admission.
None of it would work without the people. Sloane, Ellis’s theatre-kid cousin, gets most of the best lines and a running joke about disposing of bodies. The town’s elderly walking club turns out to be its gossip network. Even Cooper’s habit of leaving a different cookie on her desk becomes a quiet language of its own, and the book is clever enough not to explain it too soon.
Jake Keller deserves his own sentence. He is set up as the obvious other boy, the charming footballer who copies Ellis’s physics quiz and invites her to homecoming over waffle fries at the diner, and the novel could easily have made him a cad or a joke. Instead he is generous, funny and quick to forgive, the kind of friend who drags a girl onto a dance floor and keeps her laughing when the evening is going wrong. That generosity makes the triangle in Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson far less tiresome than most.
The narration is first person and present tense, and it moves. Ellis is clever and a little prickly, given to sorting people into categories by their contact names, and her early contempt for a town with one traffic light gives the book somewhere to travel. When the warmth finally arrives, it feels like a concession wrung out of her rather than a mood the author has imposed.
The cosiness is deliberate, and Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson wears it without apology. It shares the small-town warmth of Gilmore Girls, a show Ellis’s cousin would certainly own on DVD, and it has the good sense to puncture its own sweetness with a heroine who is, for the first third, a snob.
The Father Who Never Calls Back
What keeps the book from being only a seasonal confection is Ellis’s relationship with ambition. She has grown up doing exactly what her father models: smile for the room, hide every weakness, treat the future as a ladder. Her calls go to his voicemail for weeks. When he does ring, it is to arrange her life. The novel lets readers see before Ellis does that the plan is his, and that the girl sketching gowns after watching her favourite witches’ film on repeat may want something else.
Her mother is the slow revelation. For most of the book she seems merely passive, an easy target for a resentful daughter. Then, on the evening of the homecoming dance, she and Ellis’s aunt turn the attic into a salon, crimping and pinning, and produce a pair of designer heels she had packed just in case. It is a scene about being seen, and the reconciliation it foreshadows becomes the emotional peak of Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson. A later evening on the roof, drinking cider under the harvest moon in honour of a grandmother’s tradition, gives the family’s grief a place to sit.
Where Falling Like Leaves Loses Its Footing
The reservations are real and they gather in the second half. The middle stretch runs the same loop more than once: Ellis and Cooper drift close, one of them pulls back, and another girl’s presence sets off a fresh round of jealousy. The physical description of Cooper barely changes from chapter to chapter. Ellis’s father is less a character than a set of failures, and he is never given a scene in which to answer for them.
The final act is the larger problem. A run of revelations, a rupture and a reconciliation are packed into a few days of story time, and a decision the whole novel has been building towards arrives with too little resistance, partly because another character makes the case for Ellis in a single speech. A late rescue of the town’s finances is engineered rather than earned. Content-wise this is gentle territory: family breakdown, infidelity, old bereavement and a fair amount of swearing, with romance kept to kissing.
The Coffee Bar Behind Falling Like Leaves
Misty Wilson came to this novel from a graphic memoir, Play Like a Girl, her award-winning debut for middle-grade readers. Her acknowledgements fill in the rest of the picture. She drafted the book in the corner of a coffee bar, day after day, and its latte became the harvest spice latte that Ellis orders on her first morning. The cookies Cooper produces were inspired by a real Ohio bakery, and she names Gilmore Girls and Hart of Dixie as her small-town comfort viewing while writing.
Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson was published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in September 2025 and opens a series. The second book, Falling Like Snow, moves the focus to Sloane and the town’s first winter festival.
Where It Leaves You
Readers who loved Fake Skating by Lynn Painter, with its return to a hockey-mad Minnesota town and a shared history between the leads, will feel at home here, and anyone who has been converted by the film of Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman will enjoy how often Ellis and Sloane put it on. Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson is not subtle and does not try to be. It is a generous, funny book about a girl who arrives counting the days and leaves knowing what she actually wants to make.
Read Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson while the leaves are still on the trees. It will not keep as well in July.