Tia Williams had a fifteen-year career as a beauty editor for magazines including Elle, Glamour, Lucky, Teen People, and Essence. In 2004, she pioneered the beauty-blog industry with her award-winning site, Shake Your Beauty. She wrote the bestselling debut novel The Accidental Diva and penned two young adult novels, It Chicks and Sixteen Candles. Her award-winning novel The Perfect Find is being adapted by Netflix for a film starring Gabrielle Union. Tia is currently an editorial director at Estée Lauder Companies and lives with her daughter and her husband in Brooklyn.
Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, award-winning novelist, who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a Black literary event, sparks fly—but what no one knows is that fifteen years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love and have been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since. Over the next seven days, amidst a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's wary of the man who broke her heart. Before Shane disappears again, she needs a few questions answered...
Very early on, William's FMC Eva says that she has an invisible disability, and then she does not let the disability remain invisible for us—and from reading the reading guide at the end, it was hard work that definitely pays off. With all that Eva balances—raising her fierce yet awkwardly aged tween daughter, desiring a different direction in her writing career, fighting off the sparks that still fly with an old flame—Williams never once lets Eva's disability become invisible, creating a searing (and quite insightful, for me) depiction of someone doing their best to manage many things on top of a chronic illness.
I loved Audre's and Eva's relationship. I loved how we get flashback scenes of Eva with her mother, and how those were juxtaposed so brilliantly with Eva's scenes with her own daughter. I loved how, from the readers' perspective, we're experiencing the trauma as it is happening to a younger Eva, as well as experiencing Eva's efforts to move past it. I think this speaks brilliantly to the ways that time is not linear, and that the same could be said for anyone—that we're constantly reliving the trauma, and finding ways to combat it. I also loved how Shane was working to do the same thing with his mentees. While his story has a less-happier ending, it struck me as honest, and distressing, and heartbreaking, and real. That not everyone in this story gets a happy ending is what makes Eva and Shane's ability to choose another and choose their happy ending all the sweeter, and more meaningful and human.
Second chance romance is such a tricky trope, and Williams handles it so deftly. Eva's and Shane's teenaged relationship is not healthy, in any sense of the word. But they're struck by each other the way teenage lovers can be—even if you hadn't told me that Seven Days in June was inspired by Romeo and Juliet, I probably would have picked up on it because Eva's and Shane's young relationship has so many echoes to Shakespeare's original traumatic teen pairing. When Eva and Shane reconnect years later, they have grown into different people—except that they're still starstruck by each other. Can that unhealthy passion of youth develop into something healthy and long-lasting? I love that Williams is able to explore and answer that question by the end of Seven Days in June—a resounding yes!
Also, so much commotion for that epilogue. Like a lot of romance novels, jumping too far into the future to see an eventual happily ever after would have been so dissatisfying for this specific story. It was immensely gratifying to watch the weeks fall away and Shane and Eva find their way to one another (with the help of our favorite meddling characters, Audre and Cece!). I won't stop thinking about that epilogue for a while, for sure.
I loved this one from Tia Williams, and am definitely curious about her upcoming 2024 release, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde. Until then!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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