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Thank you to St. Martin’s Griffin and NetGalley for the advance copy in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.

Sometimes looking back is the only way forward.

Lenore French followed her artistic dreams to New York, leaving behind a historic Vermont farmhouse and the grandmother who raised her and her brother. The dreams fizzled. Lenore stayed anyway, working as a barista — until circumstance, grief, and family duty bring her home again.

Her grandmother has died, and Lenore and her brother are left to handle the sale of the French family farm. With a baby on the way, her brother entrusts the final details to Lenore, who takes leave from her job to see it through. But returning to Vermont cracks Lenore’s already fragile heart open further before she can find healing, closure, or any path forward.

Waiting for her there is Callan — the groundskeeper’s son, her brother’s best friend, and the boy she spent years trying to forget. He’s taken over his father’s job at French Hill Farm, which means the sale that’s ending Lenore’s childhood is also ending his livelihood.

Fall Into Place is a cozy, heartfelt story about love, family, and healing, and I read it fast simply because I didn’t want to put it down.

The romance is the best thing in it. If brother’s best friend is your trope, this is a good one — the old rules about what both Lenore and Callan were and weren’t allowed to want are still sitting right there between them, and the years apart have made them heavier rather than lighter. The characters are well-written, human, accessible, relatable, and there’s true chemistry on the page. Callan in particular is drawn with real care: a man whose whole life was decided for him, who admits that his red flag is not going after what he truly wants.

My one real wish is for more of the grandmother. Her journal is what reopens Lenore’s past and sets the whole story in motion, but the woman herself stays at a distance — assembled from inference and brief glimpses rather than shown to us directly. What’s there is moving. I just wanted more of it, especially given how much emotional weight the book asks that relationship to carry.

Still, a beautiful fall story, and the right kind of book for the season it’s named after.

Fall Into Place releases September 8, 2026.