Book 7/30.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Seven Days in June was messier and darker than I thought it would be from the cover and synopsis and it took me a while to get behind such messy and dark MCs as Eva and Shane had isssuuueeessss!!!
That said, halfway into this it was very clear it would be a 4 or 5 star read but after finishing it I was not immediately sure which rating to go with. The last time I was this uncertain I ended up rating both books (Before We Were Yours and A Thousand Splendid Suns) 5 stars, but this time around I’m going with 4 stars.
Why I was leaning towards a 5 star rating:
• Shane. Good Lawd Shane, and how HARD he loved Eva, is verrrryyy sexy 🥵
• Audre. I absolutely adored her 😍😍😍 and I’d be thrilled if my future daughter (hoping I’m blessed with one 🤞) is similar to Audre
• I love second chance romances and enjoyed Tia Williams’s take on the trope. Seven days to fall in love, fifteen years to forget and seven days to get it all back again. Eva and Shane met 15 years ago in high school and had a euphoric (pun intended) week together that (to put it lightly) did not end well. Since then, they’ve both become best-selling authors who have moved on with their lives, while also communicating with each other through their books, until a chance encounter gives them another seven days together.
• I always love when books educate me on something I had no idea about, or expand my knowledge on something I was only aware of at a surface level. And in this case I had no idea how debilitating living with chronic migraines can be. Eva suffers from monstrous migraines and her pain affects every part of her life. I found her illness quite jarring to read about in the beginning because of how unfamiliar I am with migraines, let alone monstrous ones, and the author (who also lives with chronic migraines) was verrrryyy vivid with her depictions.
• I loved the theme around adults overcoming childhood trauma and breaking generational curses as that is something I personally identify, and struggle, with
• The epilogue was hella cute 😍
Why I ended up rating it 4 stars:
• Teenage Eva and Shane were too fucked up for my liking. The author tries to portray the week they spent together and fell in love as euphoric, but to me it read more like trauma bonding and codependency heaped in with an amount drug abuse that wouldn’t be out of place on the TV show Euphoria
• The wokeness in speech. Yes I know this is a black book by a black author celebrating black culture, but yikes the wokeness in speech was excessive! It is for this reason that I did not warm to any of the supporting characters other than Cece as rather than sounding like actual human beings, they sounded more like an op-ed written during Black History Month.
PS: And yes, book 7 and Seven Days in June was verrrryyy intentional 😅
View all my reviews
** A guide to ratings **
1 star – did not like it
2 stars – it was okay
3 stars – liked it
4 stars – really liked it
5 stars – it was amazing
Lwile the Leo 