Review: Seven Days in June

I know I've said recently that second chance romances have slipped from the top spot on my list of favourite tropes. But I was really intrigued when I head about Tia Williams' Seven Days in June. Sure there's a second chance romance to it but this novel didn't seem like a typical romance. It seemed deeper and more angsty and it made for a read that I was totally invested in.

Here's the book's description:

Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York.
When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry-or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since.
Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered. . .

While the second chance thing had me intrigued, I was also looking forward to reading about a couple of authors. I just love bookishness in my reading material. I'm not totally sure why. I mean, I know I'm totally obsessed with books so that's a huge part of it. But it's kind of...meta, I guess?...to read a story by an author about authors. I loved that Williams threw the characters into so many Black Literati events and had every type of book lover and industry professional depicted. There were the hardcore readers who embraced the fandom, genre authors and literary darlings, publishers, editors, book reviewers and influencers. It was great. It also really made me miss book events!

Eva and Shane's relationship was, in a word, intense. It was off the charts bananas and the truth of what had happened to them fifteen years prior (the first seven days in June) just about broke my heart. It was a tough situation to begin with but then you learn more about it and I was so sad and so infuriated. And the romantic in me was distraught over all the lost time (but the realist in me understood, as the couple did, that maybe they can only work because they're older and aren't reckless teenagers). Their attraction almost seemed far-fetched but the comments from the people around them, like Audre, Eva's daughter, and Cece, their editor, made it clear that they were so much happier and healthier when they were together. That means something.

I don't know if I think all books need to be classified into a specific sub-genre but I still found myself sort of struggling to fit this novel into a box. I wouldn't call it a romance and it's not a rom com - though it does have super steamy romantic elements and it's wicked smart, it's just not laugh out loud funny. It falls into that large, vague contemporary fiction space that gets defined very differently if you're a man or a woman. And, I imagine, if you're a white woman or a Black woman. Regardless of what genre you could shove this into, it's a really good read that hits all the emotions you encounter in life.

I don't have an invisible illness like Eva, who suffered from debilitating migraines, but I do know that those kinds of disabilities (among many, many others) aren't seen in fiction all that often. I hadn't realized until the last several years how important it is to be able to see yourself reflected in the fiction you consume (whether that's books, TV, movies, and so on) because I'm straight, white woman. Eva's illness is a large part of her life, of course, but it doesn't define her and it doesn't define the novel and I think Williams found the perfect balance in this book (she does thank her own migraine doctor in the acknowledgements). 

Seven Days in June is worth a read. It's raw and real. It's sexy and smart. It's probably a few other alliterative adjectives. Tia Williams has written a few other adult novels (and YA novels) that I'm going to have to check out because I really loved her voice and writing style. 

*An egalley of this novel was provided by the Canadian distributor, Hachette Book Group Canada, via NetGalley in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*