👀 First impressions:
Don’t Fall in Love with Me is a contemporary romance set almost entirely in the Ardèche region of southern France, and it works from a premise Paige Toon has always handled well: the love that arrives too early and refuses to leave.
Grace has been in love with Jackson since she was fifteen, back when their summers were spent swimming, kayaking and drifting around his grandfather’s chateau. They were best friends, and then he married someone else, and Grace stopped going back. Three years later, Jackson reappears, newly single, with an offer she cannot refuse: her dream job, in the exact place where all of it started. Étienne, another friend from those summers, suggests they fake a relationship in order to make Jackson jealous. The plan works, which is precisely the problem.
Toon has been writing sun-drenched love stories since 2007 and has sold several million copies worldwide, and readers who know Someone I Used to Know or One Perfect Summer will recognise the territory. This one arrives with heavy expectations attached, and it mostly meets them.
✅ What I Liked:
The setting is the strongest element by a wide margin. The Ardèche is rendered with enough specificity that it stops functioning as backdrop and becomes something closer to a character. The rivers, the heat coming off stone, the caves, the slow shapelessness of a French summer afternoon. There is a real skill in making a reader homesick for a place they have never been, and the book manages it repeatedly.
The structure also earns its keep. The narrative moves between the present day and those childhood summers, and the flashbacks are not padding. They establish exactly what Grace and Jackson were to each other at fifteen, at seventeen and at twenty, so that the present day version of them carries weight it would not otherwise have. Underneath the romance sits a sharper idea, which is that the people you loved as a teenager keep living inside you in an outdated form, and meeting the current edition is genuinely disorienting.
Étienne is the book’s best invention. Love triangles usually fail because one option is obviously wrong, and this one holds its uncertainty for a long time. He is charming without being pleased with himself, and the secret he carries reframes a good deal of what precedes it.
The supporting cast deserves credit too. Toon writes chosen family well, and the women here are not accessories to the romance. They have their own lives and the good sense to tell Grace when she is being unreasonable.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
The pacing is slow, and not always productively so. The middle section accumulates detail at the expense of momentum, and there are stretches where the scenery arrives faster than the story does. Readers who need a plot that keeps moving will find this a test.
Grace is a difficult narrator to sit with at times. Her loyalty to Jackson drives the entire book, but it occasionally tips from devotion into passivity, and it takes a long while before she wants anything that is not attached to him. The resolution is satisfying. The wait for it is less so.
Jackson is the weaker point of the triangle. He is written as the golden boy, wealthy and easy and universally adored, and he never quite resolves into a person rather than an idea Grace has been carrying since adolescence. This may be deliberate, since the book is partly about the gap between memory and reality, but it does drain tension from the central question of whether they will end up together.
Set against Toon’s back catalogue, this is a lovely book rather than a devastating one. The emotional payload is lighter than her best work.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
This is a holiday in book form, and it suits a sun lounger, a long train journey or a grey month when you need to be somewhere warmer.
It will land well with readers who enjoy childhood friends to lovers, second chance romance, love triangles with two credible options, and slow burns that make you wait. Fans of Beth O’Leary, Abby Jimenez, Jill Mansell and Carley Fortune are in the right neighbourhood, and Fortune readers in particular will recognise the layered summers structure.
It also works as an entry point. No knowledge of Toon’s other books is required, and it gives a fair sense of what she does.
Worth knowing before you buy: it is steamier than much of her earlier work and heavier than the cover suggests. There is grief here, and family complication, and it is not a light read.
💭 Final Thoughts:
This is an atmospheric, emotionally intelligent romance that is unhurried to a fault. The setting is superb, the structure is smart, and Étienne quietly takes over a book he was not obviously built to lead. Against that, Grace’s passivity and Jackson’s thinness make the central romance less compelling than the world it happens in.
What lingers afterwards is not the love story so much as the sense of a place you loved as a child and cannot return to on the same terms. Toon handles that loss with real delicacy, and it is the reason this stays worth recommending despite its slower stretches.
Final Rating ★★★★ – Sun-soaked, slow-burning, and quietly heartbreaking
About the Reviewer
Minnie
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Book lover, chronic over-reader, and firm believer that the best stories are the ones that leave a mark. I review fiction across all genres with a soft spot for anything character-driven and emotionally complex. Want to know more? Head over to my About page to learn the full story.
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