Book Review: A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
If limerence were a genre, then Tia Williams has mastered that element of romance. She has proved it in her 2024 novel, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
I initially had my qualms when reading the first few pages of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde because I anticipated the recycling of the tropes and styles in her previous work. I enjoyed Seven Days in June and Accidental Diva but after reading two books with the same plot, setting and characters I felt apprehensive about A Long Song for Ricki Wilde.
I realized half way through, however, that what fascinates me about her style of romance, what keeps me coming back, is that Williams excels at playing with tension; she knows how to time moments between characters' introduction and eventual meeting, she understands the subtlety of teasing and making the reader yearn for the lovebirds to interact. The payoff is often sweet, sometimes devastating but always rewarding because as a reader, when the lovebirds meet, their interactions - no matter how minute - are charged with emotion that feel intimately personal, as though you were an integral part of their story. Williams has shown that the inexplainable magic of human connection is quite simple: it's the moments that bring us together.
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is about the timelessness of love, the weight of time the burden of expectation and how our legacy endures through others. It's a modern fairy tale that is a love letter to the City of Dreams, New York, and the history of music and Black artists.
"To me, love is like listening to an album. Some people skip to their favourite songs and ignore the rest. Other people listen to the entire album over and over, until it's familiar and cherished and they know every note by heart"
The story is written to reflect modernity and the past: Ricki's story is set in 2024 while Ezra's story is set in the 1920's, during the Harlem Renaissance. With each chapter, we get a bit of popular culture from each era, as well as nuggets about music from rthe 20th century through Ezra, who is a talented musician. Where it gets fascinating is that Ezra is revealed to be 100 years old when he meets Ricki. He has not aged one bit. But he's not a vampire! He's a perennial.
A perennial is someone who is cursed to live forever but will never be remembered. It's how Williams brilliantly showcases that love is all about how we are remembered. In his anecdotes about helping influential Black musicians of the 20th century, Ezra states that he was not credited because he was cursed to be forgotten within a week by every person who met him. Ricki Wilde, is a clumsy, free-spirited woman whose dreams go against her family values. She is made out to be a disappointment to her family, whose business dabbles in literal death - her family owns funeral homes. Ricki Wilde is the only one who does not forget Ezra after she first meets him.
They are two characters from disparate moments in time, fated to meet and conquer the supernatural. In many ways, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a chronicle of inherited, generational pain and triumphs. That's what makes Ezra and Ricki story feel real.
"I don't have any education….but learning happens everywhere, if you listen"
What I appreciate about A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is that Williams has shown that she is aware of the successful formula she's utilized in her previous books, notably Accidental Diva and Seven Days in June (my favorite). Her characters are often intensely, desperately in love and fiercely codependent. The male leads are always deeply traumatized while the female leads are often quirky, eccentric and/or naive women who are sheltered. The cliché of good girl meets bad boy is apparent but well executed.
Tia Williams is also quite self-reflexive in her writing. Her female protagonists share her predisposition to migraines, a writing career, Creole heritage, a precocious pre-teen daughter and a deep appreciation for the City of Dreams, New York.
She makes you care for her characters who have a richness, texture and depth to them. She imbues her characters with history that feels real. Both leading characters undergo a journey of self-discovery of sorts.
As mentioned earlier, Tia Williams never fails to highlight intricate elements of Black American culture, particularly as it pertains to Black women's history in America, to which Vodou is no exception. In A Love Song, the spiritual legacy of the American south plays a key role in the plot of the story, as is the acknowledgement of the 'lost' women whose stories and dreams have been drowned by the tides of time. There is a recognition that many of these women, who greatly contributed to African American culture, have been unnamed, unclaimed, unacknowledged, uncredited. Many of these women were ambitious, they were dreamers who had to resort to desperate tools such as Voodoo or Hoodoo to carve space in a world that didn't want them to take space. It is thanks to some of these women that we can celebrate women like Beyonce today, or even remember Josephine Baker.
A love song to New York, A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is an impeccable culmination of Tia Williams' writing career: a wonderful historical romance novel that celebrates Black arts and culture, Black women and Black spirituality. I'm glad I did not put this book down. I'm very excited on what Williams will write next.