Trust Fall is a sweet, swoony young adult romantic comedy that swears like a sailor. Hold that thought, because the setup deserves its moment first. Julia is a small-town Nebraska girl who loves her peaceful life until her elderly next-door neighbor dies and leaves everything to her family. He turns out to have been a secret multi-millionaire. Suddenly Julia is living in a historic brownstone in New York City and sitting in classrooms at an elite private school for the super-rich, where she doesn't fit in and, worse, is failing.
Enter the tutor. Damion is a senior with a rebellious reputation, and he happens to be the dead man's great-nephew. He can't believe the man who was a father figure to him would hand his home to strangers, so he signs on to help Julia with her grades while digging into what her family did to deserve it. If you've been waiting for an enemies-to-lovers romance with an actual lie holding up the middle, here it is. Painter writes the story in alternating points of view, so we watch Damion's plan and Julia's trust grow side by side, and the dramatic irony does a lot of the heavy lifting. Every friendly lesson carries a second purpose, and every time Julia opens up, you wince a little on her behalf.
The slow burn is slow. Readers report wanting to shake Damion early on, and that's fair: he's prickly, suspicious, and not shy about it. But his own family keeps pushing him toward the worst version of himself, and the book gives him just enough room to want something better. The banter is sharp, the tension builds on small moments, and the fall for each other arrives while they are both still insisting it isn't happening. Then the secret has to come out, and the title does its double duty. I won't tell you how that goes, only that the book is built for the moment the lie and the feelings finally collide.
The heat level is low. Sex stays in implied conversations, and the butterflies come from looks and near-misses instead. The language is another matter. The swearing is frequent enough that readers have flagged it, one of them hard enough to hang an R-for-language label on a book marketed to teens, and the characters drink and smoke on the page while the adults around them look the other way. Whether that's realistic or irritating depends on your tolerance, but go in knowing.
Why you should read
- Enemies-to-lovers romances with a real secret in the middle
- Teen rom-coms with banter and low heat
- Fans of Lynn Painter's Better Than the Movies
- Rags-to-riches, fish-out-of-water stories
- Cozy autumn reads set in New York
What to expect
- Alternating points of view between Julia and Damion
- A slow burn that takes its time
- Frequent profanity, plus on-page teen drinking and smoking
- No explicit scenes, only implied conversations
- A middle stretch that can feel a little drawn out
Underneath the romance there is real weight, which is a pleasant surprise in a book this breezy. Some readers report tearing up, and they aren't wrong to. The neighbor's death hangs over both teens, and grief is as present as the flirting. Bullying and social anxiety show up too, though a few readers found them handled lightly, and the mystery of why the inheritance went where it did lands softer than some had hoped. The pacing can also drift. Days start to feel alike, and the book runs a bit long for what it's carrying. Still, the autumn-in-New-York mood is a pleasure, and the epilogue hands Damion a piece of the future he thought he'd lost.
