A Love Story That Transcends Time—and Literary Convention
Tia Williams has crafted something extraordinary in Seven Days in June: a romance novel that dares to be both deeply literary and unabashedly swoony. This isn’t your typical meet-cute, it’s a collision of past and present that reverberates through every carefully constructed page.
The premise is deceptively simple: Eva Mercy, a successful YA author struggling with chronic pain and single motherhood, encounters Shane Hall at a Brooklyn literary event. The catch? He’s her teenage first love, the boy who vanished eighteen years ago, now transformed into a brooding literary darling whose debut novel bears an unsettling resemblance to their shared history.
What elevates this beyond standard second-chance romance territory is Williams’ unflinching examination of trauma, creativity, and the ways our past selves shadow our present lives. Eva’s chronic illness isn’t a plot device to be overcome but a lived reality that shapes every aspect of her existence. The chemistry between Eva and Shane crackles with authentic complexity—these aren’t perfect people finding perfect love, but damaged individuals wrestling with whether they can build something healthy from the beautiful wreckage of their youth.
Williams writes with the kind of emotional precision that makes you forget you’re reading fiction. Her prose shifts seamlessly from lyrical vulnerability to sharp wit, capturing both the intoxicating rush of rediscovered connection and the mature recognition of all that’s at stake. The dual timeline structure reveals their teenage romance with vivid immediacy while grounding their adult reunion in hard-won wisdom.
Perhaps most impressively, Seven Days in June manages to honor the romance genre’s promise of hope while refusing to minimize the real work required for healing—both individual and relational. It’s a novel that understands that sometimes the greatest act of love is choosing to do the difficult thing rather than the easy one.
This is the kind of book that reminds you why you fell in love with reading in the first place: it’s smart without being pretentious, romantic without being saccharine, and honest about pain without being hopeless about joy. Williams has written a love letter to second chances that feels both timeless and urgently contemporary.
