Learning to Fall by Jillian Eaton

Good Story But Needs Line Editing

Imogen is having her first day teaching English at a college in small-town Maine when we first meet her. She meets the hero, Daniel, sometime later when she and her friend are celebrating at a bar. Neither makes the best first impression, but as it’s a small town, they are bound to run into each other again.

I liked Imogen’s character. Even though she’s super smart, she has insecurities about herself as a teacher and as a woman. If you’re looking for a fast-burn romance, this one isn’t it. It’s slow burn, like romance often is in real life, as people get to know each other, have insecurities, and hold back some part of themselves out of fear. Frankly, I don’t mind this kind of romance if I understand the type of story that I’m getting into. I can sit back and simply enjoy the slow ride and the gradual unfolding of character and plot.

This book is supposed to be a revised edition, and I would be curious to know what the author actually changed. I know this book has gotten some very low star ratings. I’m wondering if she just had some proofreading done or if she added to the book. There were complaints about grammar, punctuation, and usage in the one-star reviews. I would say the book still has some issues with these, but not as many as I was led to believe from the bad reviews. I am a copy editor myself, and what I think this book actually needs is a solid line edit, where someone goes in and reworks the sentences and paragraphs to improve the flow. Especially at the beginning of the book, the author seemed to overly rely on dashes, making interrupters where there didn’t really need to be any if the sentence was just structured differently. There are lots of phrases as well as single-sentence or single-phrase paragraphs which I think makes for choppy writing (which makes for disjointed reading) and creates a barrier for the reader. Or at least for me. I also thought that the author had too many false subjects (“there” sentences) and personal passive expressions (“it” expressions where the “it” doesn’t refer to a specific noun), both of which weaken prose.

Aside from the still existing issues with language, I enjoyed this sweet and sometimes poignant real love story between two people in much need of that.