I read this book in the summer of 2022 when I first got back into reading more and it was such a great find. The book is a heavier read filled with romance, relatability, mental illness, and real life! I read this book in a time of my own personal vulnerability and I can honestly say this book touched me in ways that I wasn’t expecting.

The novel navigates through the life of Eva Mercy, a black woman in her 30’s. It flips back and forth from her present life as an erotica writer, and a single mother raising a teenage daughter back to her life
as her teenager self, reminiscing on seven days where she met a man that changed her life for the better and worse.

I found particular interest in this novel because of the relatable way she felt a deep connection to Shane Hall. It’s not often we find ourselves having these deep and meaningful connections to another person. The connections that seem so short-lived and, in the moment, but their depth and significance never leave our mind. Those people that forever live in our heart and in the back of our
mind, creeping into our everyday thoughts. Looking for parts of them in other people we meet, hearing them in the music we listen to… seeing remanences of them in the movies we watch. The individuals that have such an everlasting imprint on us that we can never escape the way they made us feel or the way they shifted our perspective on life. This type of connection is often recognized as a twin flame… when two souls are split into two, resulting in mirror images of each other that when together have an instant connection.

This twin flame perfectly describes Shane and Eva. The spark they felt in those seven summer days never left either of them, and they reconnect with one another 15 years later to find out that the connection they felt rekindled itself almost instantly. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Normally what follows this deep connection is also deep hurt. Most of the time, this type of person whom touches
our soul can sometimes leave us damaged due to this ease of becoming so deeply attached to this person.

I recently read that sometimes deep attachment like this is because in that particular moment of your life, you lacked something that this person fulfilled. This twin flame, or that specific person, fulfilled this void in that moment of time when you needed it the most. Maybe this need is emotional support, relatability, vulnerability, depth, intimacy, inspiration, validation. Whatever you were lacking, they satisfied which can intensify our attachment to them. Sometimes we feel more than what it really was because of this. Or maybe they truly were
our twin flame! When this type of relationship or attachment comes to an end, we are left damaged…sometimes feeling more damaged than before we met this person. This type of person allows us to recognize our state of true fragility and vulnerability we were in when we couldn’t see it ourselves. This damage and attachment to this person can leave us feeling hurt, uncovering and exacerbating the vulnerability that we unknowingly buried down. As a result, they leave us feeling absolutely crazy for how deeply we felt or still feel for
them.

Tia Williams does a remarkable job of making you feel like you are living in the characters whether you have experienced this type of connection or not. Not only portraying and allowing us readers to feel this deep level of hurt, vulnerability, passion and connection, Tia also brings in an element of what it’s like to live through the challenges of both mental and physical illness. Eva battled a physical ailment that affected her everyday function as a single mother and writer. She also struggled with mental health, cutting at a young age, as she experienced depression and feelings of isolation from childhood traumas living with an inattentive single mom. With Shane, she finally felt seen. On the other hand, Shane, growing up with a similar feeling of isolation and abandonment, was in and out of foster homes from a young age. As a result, Shane was self-sabotaging as a child and adult, physically hurting himself, and abusing drugs and alcohol as a young teen. In a similar way, he finally felt heard when he met Eva. They both felt voids, pain, ultimately fulfilling the empty parts of one another. Both the best thing to happen to them and the most damaging as they enabled each other’s harmful coping mechanisms. A tale of two damaged twin flames finding each other in a vulnerable seven days and eventually keeping each other for the better when they find their paths merging back to each other as healthier adults.

Whatever challenges you are dealing with in your current life, this novel is one with all-encompassing relatability and romance. I highly recommend this book as Tia offers a new and unique perspective on the realness and also gut wrenching rawness of falling in love, battling mental illness and being painfully vulnerable with another human being.

~ Alexandria Bullen 

Let me know your comments on the book or your thoughts on twin flames!