On the night after Thanksgiving, two teenagers share a couch, a comforter and a bowl of sweets while a classic Nora Ephron romance plays out its final scene. The girl is convinced the film proves something: that a person can simply know, on sight, that they have met the love of their life. The boy, who has spent the film picking out her favourite flavour from the bowl and setting it aside for her, is not so sure. He suspects love takes time, and that friendship is the better foundation. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson stages this argument on its first evening, over a viewing of Sleepless in Seattle, and then spends a whole winter proving him right.
The girl is Sloane Sullivan, sixteen, a theatre kid and the daughter of the mayor of Bramble Falls, Connecticut. The boy is Asher Yoshida, who has been her best friend since they were small enough to play in mud puddles. Every reader will know within ten pages how this ends. The question the novel has to answer is whether the journey is worth taking anyway, and for the most part it is.
A City Assembled From Small Things
Sloane was supposed to spend her winter break in New York. When her mother, buoyed by a wave of tourist attention, decides at a few days’ notice to fill December with festival events, the trip goes, and Sloane swallows her disappointment because that is what the mayor’s daughter does. Asher’s answer is to rebuild the city she wanted in pieces around their hometown, one secret evening at a time.
These sequences are the novel’s great pleasure. Friends dressed as buskers perform clumsily in the streets, every shop window in the darkened square glows with a television to stand in for Times Square, and the community theatre restages a musical Sloane had missed. None of it costs much, all of it takes effort, and Wilson understands that this is what love looks like at seventeen. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is at its most persuasive when it lets these gestures speak without commentary.
Asher is the reason Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson works. He is patient, dry and a little guarded, a choir singer whose family is pouring everything into opening a bed-and-breakfast while his father travels for work. Wilson keeps him slightly out of focus, seen only through Sloane’s eyes, and that restraint pays off: his small acts, a bag of trail mix produced at the right moment or a thumb smoothing the crease between her eyebrows, say more than any declaration could. The narration itself is chatty and fast, threaded with group texts, film quotes and a steady supply of terrible puns, and it captures a particular kind of teenage friendship, the kind conducted half in jokes, with real accuracy. Some readers will find the voice relentless. Most of the time it is simply good company.
The Grief Under the Tinsel
The book’s other strength is quieter. Sloane’s father died three years before the story opens, and December was their season. Her mother has dealt with it by never stopping, piling one event on another so that there is no evening left in which to remember him, and Sloane has gone along with it so as not to add to the load. Wilson writes the anniversary of his death as a long, nearly static day in bed, marked out hour by hour, and it is the most affecting passage in the novel. A later conversation between mother and daughter is honest without becoming a lecture.
This is where Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson rises above a standard holiday romance. The comedy is constant, and some of it, especially the mother’s running fear that her daughter is about to make her a grandmother, is very funny. But the jokes are allowed to coexist with loss rather than cover it.
Why Falling Like Snow Asks for Patience
The difficulty is that the romance depends on Sloane being unable to read what everyone around her reads instantly. Her friends tease her about Asher, her cousin raises an eyebrow, her mother hints, and even the rival for her attention eventually spells it out. Sloane denies all of it, and keeps denying it long after a reader has stopped finding the denial charming. Friends-to-lovers stories always rely on some blindness, but this one stretches it across most of the book.
The love triangle suffers in the same way. Micah Cook, the hockey player who flirts his way into Sloane’s December, is better drawn than he needs to be. He charms a crowd of elderly volunteers at the senior centre, and he eventually offers an apology and shows a measure of self-awareness. Yet he never feels like a real alternative, only a device for making Sloane notice what she already has. Daphne, the theatre friend Asher is supposedly helping with her Spanish, plays the same role on the other side and gets even less room.
The large ensemble also thins out beyond Sloane’s cousin and mother. And one late argument over a present, though it is meant to carry a deeper hurt, lands as wildly out of proportion to its cause. Readers should know that the book deals with bereavement, an absent parent and an assault at a school dance that is shown clearly and resolved with care, and that its romance stays at the level of kissing.
Where Falling Like Snow Fits
Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is the second Bramble Falls novel, following Falling Like Leaves, in which Sloane’s cousin Ellis arrives from New York for an autumn she did not want and ends up staying. That couple is now part of the background here, and the friend group carries over, but the story is self-contained and needs no homework. A flirtation between two side characters is left open in a way that looks deliberately saved for later.
The Writer Behind the Book
Misty Wilson is a teacher and a registered nurse as well as a novelist, and she lives in Northeast Ohio with her family. Her acknowledgments for this book were written, she explains, just after the first Bramble Falls novel reached the major bestseller lists, and there is a sense throughout of a writer enjoying a world she knows readers have already embraced. She also confesses there to an editor who asked her to tone down the kissing, which will surprise nobody who has read the snowed-in sleepover chapter. Her affection for television and romantic comedies is everywhere, from the films the characters quote to the way every chapter is built around a set piece.
Final Thoughts
Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is not a book of surprises, and it asks for patience in its middle stretch. What it offers instead is warmth, a heroine whose humour hides real sadness, and a love interest who shows rather than tells. Readers who enjoy it should try Fake Skating by Lynn Painter, another story of childhood friends discovering something more, and Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle, a trio of linked stories set in one snowbound small town. Falling Like Leaves is the obvious place to go next for anyone who wants the autumn that came before. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is out now.