“Fall Into You” Review | Hayley’s Comments #2

This book is just over 300 pages, including the epilogue and back matter. Yet, it almost never feels rushed or condensed down. It’s a great, bite-sized work of realistic fiction! It’s something that doesn’t require a large emotional investment like other, more complex reads. There’s even a recipe section included at the end! (I totally want to try the rosemary goat cheese potatoes)

This might be the most desirable aspect of the book. It has a very honest, true-to-life tone to it. The dialogue feels like conversations you’ve had before. The jokes feel like jokes you’ve told before. Everything feels like stuff you could actually go through. It includes small little details that aren’t technically important to the plot, but are entertaining and add to the realism of it. E.g., the twin toddlers who like to parrot their parents’ cuss words, the super-protective Italian mother, the hard-working med school student. It honestly reads like an autobiography.

Most of this book takes place in post-Covid New York City, and contains all the relevant themes. From wearing masks in the hospital to mentioning cancelled social events, it includes many relatable themes and scenarios from the Covid-19 era that are refreshing and new to see in a published work. It also portrays life in New York City fairly accurately, not glamourizing or romanticizing like many novels do. It does this without leaning too heavily in the “set in the big city’ aspect that a lot of other rom-coms lean on to carry the plot.

Some of the characters come off as very one-note and shallow at times. There’s the stereotypical Italian-American family from Long Island, the super cool and stylish best friend, and more. There were times when I audibly groaned at how corny it got. Even the main character, Liza; she’s dropped into this “not like other girls” stereotype that doesn’t let up until the last 3rd of the book.

Take this excerpt from Page 18:
“You could easily say that I wasn’t very popular growing up, due in large part to my huge, frizzy hair and nerdy tendencies. I preferred to stay in and watch Buffy The Vampire Slayer reruns than go out partying, thank you very much.”

Moments like this are dotted throughout the book, and it can get pretty old. Granted, most of these are in the first couple chapters, but they’re still present regardless. And it’s not like there’s a self-awareness to it; the characters are legitimately like this.

Relating to the point above, most of the characters don’t seem to have a lot of complexity to them. Liza, Vinny, and Matt do show a good bit of intricacy to them, but most of the others just seem like stock characters meant to fill in voids in the plot. Most are only mentioned a couple times, have little dialogue, and/or aren’t given enough space to exhibit their own personalities, what makes them unique and human. The biggest example is Barbara, Liza’s best friend. Though she does get her own spinoff, there was plenty of potential for her to play a bigger, more interesting role in this book.

In a way, Fall Into You is like a cheeseburger with whole wheat buns; the meat is delicious, but the top and the bottom parts are almost enough to throw the whole thing off. As mentioned, the first few chapters throw you into a mess of clichés and mediocre dialogue. It appears Frank fell into the all-too-common writer’s trap of rushing through the beginning parts of a story in order to get to the bread and butter, the parts she really wanted to write. Then the latter few chapters focus on the plot twist of Liza discovering her surprise pregnancy with Matt, which I think was poorly executed. Six weeks after getting knocked up by your brother’s best friend who you’ve been dating behind his back, a baby belonging to two late-20’s med school graduates with recently-deceased fathers who haven’t been in loving relationships in years, living in the most expensive city in the United States…and everybody is just cool with that? Not one qualm, quandary, or moment of contemplation? And on top of that, they get married too? I understand that some artistic liberties need to be taken for he same of entertainment, but the suspension of disbelief can only go so far.