What if you had a second chance with the one who got away?
Think about it for a moment. Be honest with yourself. Would you take the chance? Or would it be too painful to revisit the past, the reasons it didn’t work out the first time around? Would the flame even still be there?
In her latest novel, Seven Days in June, Tia Williams poses all of these questions and more. 15 years ago an undeniable bond was created between high school seniors Genevieve Mercier and Shane Hall. Genevieve grew up moving from city to city as her mother moved from boyfriend to boyfriend. Shane grew up moving from foster home to foster home, bouncing in and out of juvenile detention in between. But when they met, they clicked in a way neither ever had with anyone else, feeling completely understood by one another. For a week after meeting, Genevieve and Shane ran away together, dulling their individual pain with alcohol, drugs, and each other. Then, seven days later, they were gone from each other’s lives. Everything changes, however, when Shane unexpectedly shows up to explain what happened all those years ago.
A lot can change over a decade and a half. Genevieve has become Eva Mercy: bestselling erotica writer, single mother to a precocious pre-teen, and more or less content with her lot in life. Shane has also become a writer—a National Book Award winner, in fact—as well as a teacher and mentor for kids who remind him of his own childhood. Some things don’t change, though, despite the time or distance. Eva and Shane’s electric chemistry is one of those things. Across all these years they have stayed connected through their books, writing messages to each other, saying things which couldn’t be said face-to-face. So when Shane waltzes back into Eva’s life for another seven days, who knows what might happen …
Tia Williams has created the perfect balance of romance and heat, tension and desire, humour and relevant social context. This novel is sexy and smart. The characters are complex, not canned or one-dimensional. The pop culture references are timely and often hilarious. And the commentary on current issues (like the publishing industry’s tendency to focus on stories which centre the suffering of Black characters, for example) is spot on.
Overall, Seven Days in June is an uplifting yet realistic romance, in the sense that we all have our own history, but this history does not have to define us. Life is too short to live in the past, after all; we must find a way to move on. And Williams explores whether Eva and Shane can do just that. Can they forgive each other and move forward? Is there even something real left between them to move forward towards? You’ll just have to read the book and find out for yourself!
Seven Days in June is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, as of June 1st 2021. Many thanks to Grand Central Publishing for providing me with an advance copy of this novel. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Will you be picking up Seven Days in June? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again… From the author of The Perfect Find, this is a witty, romantic, and sexy-as-hell new novel of two writers and their second chance at love.
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. . .
With its keen observations of Black life and the condition of modern motherhood, as well as the consequences of motherless-ness, Seven Days in June is by turns humorous, warm and deeply sensual.
