Love & Time in “A Love Song for Ricki Wilde”

Tia Williams’s magical Harlem romance celebrates the selves we have yet to meet and the art that keeps us alive

I first picked up A Love Song for Ricki Wilde in mid-February, fully expecting to fall into it. Instead, I made it through two chapters and put it down. This wasn’t the book’s fault. I’m a huge mood reader, and sometimes even the right book arrives at the wrong moment. So I set it aside, read approximately seven other books, and didn’t return until late March.

When I finally picked it up again, I couldn’t put it down.

So…timing matters?!

Some books need you to meet them halfway; others seem to wait until you’re ready to enter the particular world they’ve made. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde was waiting for me.

And this IS a love story.

Not just a romance—though the romance is central, passionate, and beautiful—but a love story about Harlem, art, history, family, possibility, and the many versions of ourselves we have not yet become.

When we meet Ricki Wilde, she is talented and out of place within her wealthy Atlanta family. Her sisters are polished socialites who fit neatly into the Wilde family image. Ricki is more free-spirited, more creative, and less interested in performing the version of success expected of her.

She needs a change—not a small adjustment, but the kind that requires a new city and enough distance to hear your own thoughts. That opportunity arrives through Ms. Della, an extraordinary older woman who offers Ricki a place in her Harlem brownstone. Ricki leaves her family and disappointing love life behind, moves to New York, and begins pursuing her dream of opening a flower shop.

The move is both escape and self-creation. In Atlanta, Ricki is the Wilde daughter who does not fit. In Harlem, she has the chance to discover who she might be without her family constantly supplying the answer.

I loved that the novel does not frame reinvention as becoming an entirely different person. Ricki’s new life allows qualities she already possesses—her creativity, optimism, sensuality, and willingness to take risks—to become useful rather than embarrassing. She is not fixing herself. She is finding the right conditions in which to grow.

That idea sits at the heart of one of my favorite lines in the book:

“But identity changes all the time, I’ve found. There’s a few more ‘yous’ you haven’t met yet.”

There is such generosity in that thought. The self is not a finished project, and the version of your life you can currently imagine is not the only one available to you.

Ricki’s new neighborhood feels alive with the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The past is not sealed away as background or trivia; it remains present in the music, buildings, art, and people who have made—and continue to make—the neighborhood what it is.

Williams’s Harlem is vibrant, stylish, romantic, and full of memory. Ricki is not simply moving into a brownstone and opening a business. She is entering a creative lineage. That sense of history gives the novel’s celebration of art real weight. The characters live in a world where time passes quickly, people are lost, and even extraordinary lives can be forgotten. Art becomes one way of resisting that disappearance. Music, flowers, stories, and beauty preserve what ordinary memory cannot hold forever.

Ricki says it best:

“Well the world may be in shambles around us,” said Ricki, ever optimistic, “but we’re still creating through it. We’ll always have art, love, stories, adventures, beauty....”

That optimism never felt naïve to me. It isn’t a denial of grief or disorder. It’s a choice to keep making something within them.

This is part of why the book feels so full of life. It understands that joy is not the absence of loss. Joy is what people create in its presence.

One February night, a strange and beautiful jasmine scent fills the air, and Ricki meets Ezra: mysterious, gorgeous, and very clearly about to turn her new life upside down.

I kid you not, I literally felt the novel shift in their first encounter during that scene. The romance is grounded in attraction and chemistry, but magic runs beneath it—actual magic.

Williams allows the supernatural elements to deepen the love story rather than overpower it. Ezra’s mystery gives the romance its central tension, but his relationship with Ricki works because they feel so alive together. Their connection is passionate, funny, sexy, and full of a shared appetite for life.

I wanted to live in this book.

Ricki and Ezra’s romance has the heightened feeling of a love song: repetition, longing, rhythm, and the sense that certain emotions are too large for ordinary speech. The book does not apologize for being deeply romantic. It believes in grand feeling, impossible timing, and the idea that love can rearrange a life.

But it also understands that time is what gives love its urgency.

“You ever think about the fact that your whole life is a memory?” he asked. “Everything is past except for right now. And right now’s gone in a flash.”

The line captures one of the novel’s central concerns. The present is constantly becoming the past, which means loving anyone requires accepting that nothing can be held still.

As another line reminds us:

“Besides, life sits shoulder to shoulder with death. It’s around us all the time.”

The book’s magic makes that closeness visible, but the feeling itself is ordinary and recognizable. Every romance exists under the pressure of time. Every life we build is temporary. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde responds not with despair, but with insistence: love anyway, make art anyway, begin again anyway.

The story is electric—funny, passionate, and sexy—and Williams fills it with characters who feel animated by their own desires. Ricki and Ezra are beautiful together, but what I loved most was their zest for life.

This is not a romance in which love rescues a woman from having no direction. Ricki has already begun choosing herself before Ezra appears. She has left Atlanta, accepted Ms. Della’s offer, and committed to her flower shop. The romance does not give her a life; it expands the one she is actively building.

That distinction matters. Ricki’s love story is part of her becoming, not a replacement for it.

The novel’s vivid descriptions pulled me into the characters, their histories, and the different eras they inhabit. Somehow, it felt like summer between the pages even when the story was set in February—the kind of warmth that makes you want to dance through every chapter.

The title promises a love song, and the novel keeps returning to music as a way of understanding intimacy. One of my favorite passages compares lasting love to listening to an album:

“To me, love is like listening to an album. Some people skip to their favorite 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. That’s how Dr. Bennett and I loved each other. He was music I could listen to forever.”

That is the kind of love the book celebrates—not only the dramatic beginning or the favorite track, but the decision to know the entire album by heart. Love as attention. Love as memory. Love as returning.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a romance, a magical story, and a celebration of living fully. It is also a book about refusing to believe that the self you are today is the only self you will ever have.

Ricki leaves the life that no longer fits her and discovers that reinvention does not require rejecting everything she has been. It requires trusting that there are more versions of her waiting to be met.

The book is vibrant without feeling empty, romantic without becoming weightless, and hopeful without ignoring death, grief, or the speed with which the present becomes memory. Williams brings all of those ideas together through Harlem, history, music, flowers, and one love story that seems to exist both inside and outside ordinary time.

I am glad I did not force myself to keep reading in February. Had I pushed through when the book was not calling to me, I might have missed the magic of meeting it at the right moment.

When that moment came, I loved every page.

I can’t wait to forget it so I can read it again.

Happy reading!

x