The first Bramble Falls book belonged to Ellis, the city girl sent to spend an autumn in her mother’s tiny Connecticut town. Sloane Sullivan was the cousin who showed her around, the mayor’s daughter with a pun for every occasion. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson hands Sloane the microphone, and it starts by taking away the one thing she wanted. The day after Thanksgiving, her mother calls an emergency meeting around the kitchen table and announces that the town, newly famous for its viral autumn festival, will now stage a winter one. December starts in two days. Sloane’s winter-break trip to New York with Ellis quietly dies on the spot.

What happens next is the book’s best idea. Asher Yoshida, her best friend since kindergarten, decides that if Sloane cannot go to the city, the city will have to come to her. He starts with a dinner in his back yard, inside an igloo he has spent a week building by hand and lined with fairy lights.

Where Falling Like Snow Sits in Bramble Falls

Wilson is building a series in which each book takes a new season and a new couple, while the friends from earlier books stay on as the supporting cast:

1. Falling Like Leaves (2025): Ellis and Cooper fall for each other during the autumn festival.
2. Falling Like Snow (out now, 6 October 2026): Sloane and Asher over one December.
3. Falling Like Stars (announced, date to come): Jake’s story, with a cover revealed on 20 October 2026.

Ellis and Cooper are now a settled couple in the background, and their autumn is referred to in passing, which is the main thing a new reader would notice.

What Falling Like Snow Adds

The first change is tone. Sloane narrates in a breezy present tense full of jokes, film references and text-message exchanges, and she is funnier than Ellis was. The second is weight. Her father died three years ago, in December, and winter is now the season she loves and dreads at once. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is at its best when those two things sit side by side: Sloane laughing at a party, then coming home to find a stocking with her dad’s name on it and putting it back in the box.

The third change is the romance itself. Where book one built its couple from scratch, this is friends-to-lovers, and Wilson leans into every beat of it. A popular hockey forward, Micah Cook, flirts with Sloane after she crashes into him on a sledding hill. Asher, meanwhile, starts tutoring a theatre friend called Daphne and keeping secrets. The reader knows exactly where this is going. The fun is supposed to be in the getting there.

What works

• Asher’s gift is the heart of it. Each stage of his Night in New York City arrives as a surprise, and Wilson makes them inventive and cheap in the way teenagers’ gestures really are. A rink he floods in the town square to stand in for Rockefeller Center is a highlight.
• The grief is honest. A scratched blue ornament her father once said looked like an S for Sloane, and her mother’s habit of filling every hour with work rather than talking about him, are handled without melodrama.
• The mother steals scenes. Naomi Sullivan is a mayor who births festivals overnight and teases her daughter mercilessly, and the relationship between them gives Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson its warmest material.
• Micah gets more than one dimension. He is more than the wrong boy. He screen-prints Sloane’s pun T-shirts in his garage and volunteers when he does not have to, and Wilson resists turning him into a cartoon.

Where It Gives Ground

• The middle runs on misunderstandings. In Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson, secrets are kept for no good reason, a lie goes unexplained, and nobody checks an assumption. A single honest conversation would settle most of the second half, and the book half admits it.
• Sloane’s inner loop repeats. From roughly the halfway point she cycles through the same worry about losing Asher, and the same stomach flips and racing pulses, more often than the plot needs.
• Threads are left for later. A flirtation between Jake and Ellis’s friend Fern is set up and then parked, presumably for the next book.

Do You Need Falling Like Leaves First?

No. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson explains everything it needs in the opening chapters: who Ellis is, why the town is suddenly busy, and how the friend group fits together. Reading book one first adds some pleasure, mainly in watching Cooper and Ellis as an established couple and catching references to the autumn festival. But Sloane’s story is complete on its own, and it is a perfectly good place to start.

Read These Next

If Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson leaves you wanting more teenage romance with a festive or film-loving streak, try these:

1. Better Than the Movies by Lynn Painter, for another rom-com-obsessed heroine slowly working out who she actually wants.
2. The Summer I Turned Pretty by Jenny Han, for the friend-versus-new-boy dilemma at its most famous.
3. Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, if you want the actual New York at Christmas that Sloane misses out on.
4. Falling Like Leaves by Misty Wilson, the first Bramble Falls book, for the autumn festival and Ellis’s story.

About Misty Wilson

Misty Wilson started out writing for younger readers. Her first book was a graphic memoir about the year she played on a boys’ football team, and Bramble Falls is her move into young adult romance. The series has caught on quickly, and a third book is already on the way. The dedication is addressed to anyone who decorates the day after Halloween, and the details of Asher’s family traditions, including a Christmas strawberry cake, draw on how Christmas is celebrated in Japan.

• Her debut, Play Like a Girl (2022), was published by Balzer + Bray and illustrated by David Wilson.
• A collector’s edition of Falling Like Leaves made the New York Times young adult hardcover list.
• This book was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.
• Her next graphic novel, Penny Out of Place, is due from HarperCollins in February 2027.

What Stays With You

It is predictable, and it knows it. The middle takes the long way round, and the triangle never threatens the ending anyone can see coming. What stays is the kindness of it: a boy who could not afford a plane ticket and built his best friend a city instead, a girl learning to say her father’s name out loud, and a mother who finally sits still. Falling Like Snow by Misty Wilson is the cosiest YA romance of the season, best read under a blanket with the snow coming down.