Dylan Morrison’s Fall Into You is billed as a romantic comedy, but I think the best description I’ve seen of it (genre-wise) is along the lines of ‘Emily Henry but gay’. There is a romance here, but the focus is more on the emotional journey of the narrator/protagonist, so I’d say it fits more into the space currently occupied by those ‘romance hybrids’ that are so common now.

William Josiah Robertson IV was expected to follow in the footsteps of William Josiah Robertsons I, II and III and continue the stewardship of the Robertson Family Farms, founded over a hundred years ago by the first William – Bill. Bill Robertsons are supposed to be rugged and charismatic and smart, with a head for business, numbers and the bottom line – but it quickly became apparent that the fourth William was very much a ‘Will’ and not a ‘Bill’. Quiet, sensitive, easily injured and often ill, Will was certainly smart – “too smart” according to his father whenever Will made a suggestion he didn’t like – but he was smart in a way nobody knew what to do with. After eighteen years of trying hard to be what his family wanted him to be, and exhausted by his father’s constant disappointment and criticism, Will turned his back on Glenriver and the farm, fully intending never to return.

Fast forward sixteen years, and Will, now a research botanist based in Chicago, is on his way to Glenriver having inherited the farm and orchards after his father’s recent death. He’s only going back in order to tie up some loose ends and to finalise the sale of the property to an entertainment company that plans to expand a local festival. As he takes a walk around the farm and the orchards, he notices the place is obvously being well cared for and that a lot of changes and improvements have been made he’s sure his father would not have been capable of in his final illness. This impression continues when he enters the market building, which is bright, airy and well-organised rather than the dimly lit slightly shambolic place he recalls. Then his eyes come to rest on the seriously attractive guy behind the counter, tall, blond, broad-chested and square-jawed; in short, everything a Bill Roberston is supposed to be and who is clearly content living the life Will never wanted. They chat amiably for a while, until the guy – farm manager Casey Reeves – realises who Will is and the friendly atmosphere changes abruptly as both men jump to unfortunate conclusions.

The enemies-to-lovers vibe is done well here (it so rarely is, these days it seems!) with the author unafraid to paint his characters in a poor light. Will is the sole narrator so we only get his perspective, but the reasons behind their conflict feel genuine; Casey believes Will is about to sell the home he’s lived in for the past six years out from under him, and because has no idea how Robertson III treated his son, he thinks that Will simply ran off and left his dad in the lurch. And Will, whose feelings towards his dad are a complicated mess he’s not even begun to unravel yet, and who is already on edge at simply being back home and expected to make big decisions, can’t help feeling perhaps just a little bit aggrieved at having been so easily replaced – even though he didn’t want to be there. Still, Casey had no right to say the things he did and Will is determined to dislike him.

Fall Into You is, then, one of those protagonist-who-fled-their-home-town-returns-and-finds-love stories, although honestly, the romance takes a bit of a back seat to Will’s emotional journey as he faces his past trauma and comes to see his father and their relationship through a more mature lens. So I suspect the degree to which you enjoy (or not) the book will depend on how far you relate to Will, who is sweet and kind and nerdy; a loner with a tendency to over-think everything and who is uncomfortable in social situations.

I enjoyed it for the most part, and the author does a very good job of showing Will starting to unpack all the complex emotions being back home has stirred up, and starting to come to terms with them and what they mean for him going forward. I liked Will coming to realise that his memories of the town and its people aren’t particularly accurate and coming to see that the place isn’t so bad after all… and starting to understand what he actually ran away from. Extra points to Morrison for not making the townsfolk the quirky collection of misfits so often found in this type of novel; instead they’re a bunch of regular people living their regular lives and doing their best, like the rest of us.

The romance is, as I’ve said, not the main focus of the story, but Will and Casey have good chemistry and I enjoyed watching their initial antagonism transform into something sweet and genuine. Casey is a good guy – he’s not very sympathetic at first, but he does own his poor behaviour when he gets the full story, and his being in a tricky situation as regards the farm does make it easier to understand why he acts as he does. But because the book is really about Will’s personal journey, Casey can sometimes feel like a secondary character rather than a love interest.

There are a couple of things that require a rather large suspension of disbelief. The first is Will’s statement that after he left home at eighteen, he “found an apartment, and then a job, and then I applied to college, and got in.” I don’t know how things work in the US, but Will being able to rent an apartment on his own at eighteen without having to provide proof he could afford it/proof of income couldn’t happen in the UK. Then later, there’s Casey’s offhand comment that he’d been able to pay for Will’s father to be in a nursing home for the year before he died because he’s “more or less allergic to rent” and has “a lot more saved up than most people do.” That would have to have been a LOT of money (I’d say well over 50K in my neck of the woods), so how on earth could someone of Casey’s age (twenty-eight) who had lived a fairly nomadic life (so wouldn’t have been making big bucks) have afforded that?

As the book went on, I admit that I struggled a bit with Will’s tendency to drift off into long internal monologues, because they disrupt the momentum of the story. That wasn’t too much of an issue in the first part of the novel, but by the final third, it was happening too often and I was starting to zone out a bit.

All in all, however, Fall Into You is an enjoyable – if predictable and slightly syrupy – story featuring likeable characters and a sweet slow-burn romance in which the explorations of grief, expectations and identity are nicely done. I enjoyed it enough to want to keep an eye out for whatever Dylan Morrison comes up with next.