A Love Song for Ricki Wilde | Tia Williams

Love and death meet up here in this fun romantic novel by Tia Williams, a former beauty editor for big time fashion magazines who (of course) lives in Brooklyn. Anyway, This is a fun read. It's a romance, it's magical realism and it's also a story about finding your own path and dealing with what you discover along the way. Ricki was named for her father, the youngest of four beautiful girls in Atlanta. She's the black sheep and is ridiculed by her family of tyrants regularly. The family is Black aristocracy in Atlanta. They own a chain of funeral homes. Ricki escapes her fate of being a look-alike and uninteresting daughter by moving to Harlem to open a flower shop. She's a wildly creative floral designer. She meets a lovely older woman, Della, who offers up her basement apartment as her location and becomes her adopted granddaughter. Then we (and Ricki) meet Ezra, a musician who becomes a band leader in the Harlem Renaissance.

Obviously they fall hard for each other (it's a romance novel, after all) but it's far more complicated than that because how could they possibly meet when Ezra was in Harlem in the 1920s and Ricki is setting up her business in 2024? That's obviously where the magical realism comes in. Connections between characters abound and the story is fun but not just light and fluffy. It's a good read. I read about it in a wrap-up story in the NY Times Book Review (cozy winter reads) but it fits just as well for a summer beach read that's not completely mindless. Enjoy!