A Love Song for Ricki Wilde Review
Book 9 of 2025
A love story for the ages, literally.
If you are looking for a swoon worthy romance with a magical edge to it, look no further than A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams. This book had me gripped from chapter 1 and didn’t let go until the last page. Was I able to predict most of the twists? Yes. Did I care? No. The storytelling in this book is a work of art and you end up falling in love with every character (except maybe Ricki’s family and first boyfriend who kind of suck).
I don’t want to give you too much of the plot because it will spoil the magic, but in a nutshell…
Ricki is the youngest daughter of a wealthy family. The expectation is that all the Wilde daughters will eventually join the family business, a chain of high end funeral homes, but Ricki has other dreams. She’s built an online following around her floral designs and decides to take off on her to start a flower shop in NYC. Her family is disappointed and never really understood the offbeat, wild (pun intended), and different nature of their youngest child.
Once in NYC, Ricki meets Della, an older wealthy widow, who offers Ricki the space below her brownstone apartment at reduced rent with the condition that she has tea with her once a week. Ricki gladly agrees and their relationship blossoms (also pun intended because flower shop) into a grandmother/granddaughter bond that I absolutely adored.
One night Ricki meets a gorgeous, yet strange man in a community garden and the love story between Ricki and Ezra begins.
I will say no more because you simply need to read this book.
If I had one critique it would be that the spicy scenes sometimes took me out of the world of the novel. I don’t usually shy away from spice. (I read the entire Zodiac Academy, spice doesn’t scare me.) But in this case, I think there was more than needed. I was so invested in the story that when the open door spicy scenes leapt off the page, it took me out of the love story and just felt inauthentic to Ricki and Ezra. I don’t know, I could be wrong, but I would have been fine knowing that they had a vibrant sex life, but not reading every aspect of it. Might be just me.
Rating: 4.5/5
Granny Square: If I were to redo the granny square, I would have added some purple in there, but I really wanted to honor the fact that this is also a book about Black history, so I didn’t want to erase the use of brown in my granny square.
