Review: Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

With every step she took, the years melted away. Shane was hurtling backward into his teenage self, before the books, the success, the travel. Back in the dark ages, when his loneliness was like quicksand, when he’d ruin himself to make it stop–and the only bright spot in all of this was loving a beautiful girl with demons ferocious enough to slay his own.

For seven days, a million Junes ago.

Chapter 9: A Verbal Blush, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams

Preamble

Continuing the theme of reading books by Black authors for Black History Month, I read Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, a romance novel. I first heard about this book through one of my favourite booktubers lexi aka newlynova who said that this was one of the best romance novels she had ever read so I put it in my to-be-read pile for later.

Let’s get into it.

The Book

This book is on balancing on the knife’s edge between being pretty good and being somewhat annoying to read. It has some lovable, interesting and fully fleshed out characters with a fiery romance. On the other hand, the book tries to be funny at points and completely falls flat with its jokes.

Let’s get the big bad out of the way – there appears to be two instances of what appears to be product placement for running related products which felt jarring. Well, I don’t know for sure if they are product placement or products that the author genuinely likes. The lines in which they get mentioned do read like an ad read and they don’t quite fit the vibe of the book.

Smaller annoyances – at one point, the main character’s teenage daughter Audre uses the word “heterotypical” and there is a comment about how Brooklyn private schools (one of which this daughter goes to) produced “ultra-progressive students”. I don’t know about that particular word, is that a thing the teens are actually using or is that something the author made up? Wouldn’t such a ultra-progressive teenager know and use the word “heteronormative” instead?

An example of the kind of humour this book goes for – at one point one of the main characters, a Black author named Shane Hall is standing outdoors and a passerby out running mistakenly thinks he is Ta-Nehisi Coates and says I kid you not, “My God. You’re Ta-Nehisi Coates!” to which Shane responds with “Nah. But he’d appreciate that you pronounced his name right. I learned the hard way”. I’m sure this bit is funny to someone but the joke just didn’t land for me.

Alright, now that I’ve gotten the bad stuff out of the way, let’s talk about the aspects of the book I read. The romance here is good. There is just the right amount of romantic tension and drama here. There is a good amount of yearning and just the right amount of smut involved. There is a certain rom-com quality to the romance that I enjoyed and the ending made my heart happy.

I also really liked that one of our main characters, Eva has an invisible disability (chronic migraines) that is portrayed with nuance and integrated into the narrative well. Both main characters (Shane and Eva) have mental health issues that they continue to deal with and I thought the way these struggles was weaved into the story of their relationship does justice to the very serious issues they are dealing with. I’ll make a content warning note here that this book contains mentions of self-harm, specifically cutting.

Conclusions

So, is this one of the best romance novels I’ve ever read? No, not quite, that honour still goes to The Beautiful Ones by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. I’ll caveat that statement by saying that romance is not my usual genre and I haven’t read a lot of romance novels – which is part of the reason I read this – to expand my horizons.

This book is built on a rock-solid foundation of an intriguing, gut-wrenching romance. What brings it down for me is its everything surrounding the romance – the humour, the mentions of how woke these youth who go to private schools are, the jarring product placements, jokes that land flat – all of this is extraneous fluff that I could have done without. Essentially the “comedy” part of the romantic-comedy in this book doesn’t work for me.

I would like to thank lexi for this recommendation: it was certainly a good and easy read. I breezed through the book in two days. I don’t know if I would read more by this author but it definitely fleshed out what aspects of romance novels I like and also what I don’t like. That is always a valuable lesson.

That’s all from me folks. See y’all next time.

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