Fall

by Kristen Callihan

October 23, 2018 · Plain Jane Books

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A content warning before I begin: both the book and this review discuss depression, anxiety, and suicide. There is repeated mention of the male lead’s previous suicide attempt, and while it does not appear on the page, late in the book there is a flashback to his thoughts in that moment. It is my belief that these subjects are handled with the care they require.

Fall is the third book in Kristen Callihan’s VIP series and it features John “Jax” Blackwood, frontman of the band Kill John, as its hero. The story stands entirely on its own, though couples from earlier in the series make their appearances.

The book begins the night before a March blizzard hits New York City when Stella Grey, our female lead, kisses a man in the grocery store to distract him from taking the last carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream. And I mean, who hasn’t kissed a strange man in a grocery store who you later realize, while guiltily eating said ice cream you snatched away from him, is a very famous rockstar? That’s what happens to Stella.

When Stella and John meet again as temporary neighbors (I love romance’s love of convenient neighbors), a slow burning friendship and romance ensues. They fall from mutual irritation to love in the seclusion of their apartments and around Manhattan. John appears to have all the careless cockiness that his career as a mega rockstar allows and Stella moves through her life largely disconnected from other people.

Stella and John are both dealing with a lot. Stella has been entirely on her own since she was eighteen and her father left. This, in conjunction with a profession where she is paid to provide friendship, has resulted in a lot of doubt as to her worth and in years of emotional isolation.

I found that the strongest part of this book was the deft exploration of the complexity of John’s mental illness. It encapsulates both the small ways that depression and anxiety can wreak havoc on our lives (like me, John has to make lists of things he needs to do everyday because his depression affects his memory) to the heartbreakingly large ones.

“And all I could think was, who the fuck am I? I felt like a lie, and then all this…ugliness started pouring in—telling me I was unlovable, unworthy, a fake—until I felt so dirty and trapped in my own skin that I couldn’t stand it. And there was no way out.”

John spends much of the book believing that he is incapable of love, only to later believe that it is selfish for him to be in love because his depression, he believes, inherently makes him a poor partner. He is often embarrassed by what he can’t do and by the help and support he needs. The book strikes the delicate balance of depicting him both needing help from other people and needing to hold himself accountable for his own care: making his lists, going to see his therapist, allowing himself to be vulnerable when he needs help.

While I felt that John’s story carried most of the novel’s emotional weight, Stella also comes to the relationship with her own painful history. Much of Stella’s emotional growth revolves around the isolation in which she’s lived her entire adult life and dealing with ongoing feelings of inadequacy. These feelings are only multiplied by her growing closeness with John, who, as a famous musician, will always be surrounded by people and may never be fully rooted in one place.

Keeping all of this in mind, there are certainly topics that are handled with much less finesse. In one instance, John, having seen Stella out with a number of older men and overhearing conversations where those men talk about paying her, assumes that Stella is an escort and tells her so. This leads to a couple instances of uncomfortable sex work shaming disguised as concern.

Without giving too much away, there is also some clunky handling of an STI plotline. What I needed from this storyline was for someone to FIRMLY refute the idea that STIs are shameful or tainting. It is one thing to have the character believe this about themselves; it is, after all, an incredibly common stigma. However, when an attempt to disrupt this way of thinking is made, the conversation gets away from this topic so quickly that I found myself desperately wishing they would go back to it.

I push on. “I doubt many people go looking to get a disease. And even if they weren’t acting responsibly, should that matter? Don’t put that shame on them, on yourself. Don’t be one of those people who acts like their shit doesn’t stink, who think that by shaming others who have fucked up or face misfortune, it will protect them from unfortunate things befalling them as well. It’s false comfort at best, and there’s already too much judgment in the world as it is.”

John rubs a hand over his face and sighs. “Can we skip the lecture? I’m simply telling you what the world already thinks of me.”

Again, my issue is not that John feels shame, but rather that it felt like the entire conversation was being dismissed. From there, Stella retreats, and the story doesn’t really return to it. I couldn’t help but be disappointed that the narrative didn’t fully extend itself on this point. I was, however, grateful for the emphasis put on getting tested regularly and the necessity of informing current or previous partners of any positive results as soon as possible.

Fall is difficult for me to grade. As deeply as I cared about Stella and John working to be good partners to each other, I was not particularly interested in their relationship outside of these deeply emotional moments. Their dialogue felt heavy handed and overly quirky, the latter being a major pet peeve of mine. Their sexual interactions continuously contained odd phrasing that pulled me out of the moment time and time again. From referring to Stella’s nipples as “honey tips” (out loud) to saying that “she’s a juicy handful”, I was uninterested at best and cringing at worst for much of their flirtatious moments. Those are only the two instances that haunt my memory, though trust that there are many, many more of these examples.

But I so dearly appreciate what I believe is the heart of this story. This is a book about two people who want to be good partners to each other, but are unsure if they are able to be. In a world where the message, “you can’t love others until you love yourself” runs rampant, I cling to the truth of this novel’s thesis: your pain does not make you unworthy of love. Some, like John, like myself, will move through most of our lives with mental health issues. And we will be worthy of love, and capable of it, the whole time. At its best moments, this is the story Fall tells. In its weaker ones, dialogue meant to be funny feels false, and whatever care I had garnered for the characters in their quieter moments started to deflate. In the end, from a book that gave so much, I still wanted more. I wanted the lighter moments to rise to the occasion of their more serious counterparts and couldn’t help being disappointed when they didn’t.