{"id":6548,"date":"2026-06-10T04:45:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T04:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6548"},"modified":"2026-06-10T04:45:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T04:45:15","slug":"the-missed-connection-by-tia-williams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6548","title":{"rendered":"The Missed Connection by Tia Williams"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have ever boarded a plane hoping for an empty middle and instead landed beside someone who rearranges your spinal column with one glance, The Missed Connection by Tia Williams<\/em> will feel like a love letter to that exact six hours of in-flight delirium. Williams, the Brooklyn-based bestselling author of Seven Days in June<\/em> and A Love Song for Ricki Wilde<\/em>, has built her latest around a question every modern romantic has asked themselves at least once: what would I actually do if the stranger I couldn\u2019t stop thinking about vanished into baggage claim before I caught his name?<\/p>\n

Her answer is gloriously chaotic.<\/p>\n

The Premise That Hooks on Page One<\/h2>\n

Sasha Cruz is a casting director who can read a room the way most of us read a menu. She built her career assigning the right faces to the right roles, and somewhere along the way she typecast herself as a single woman with anxiety, antidepressants, and a quietly catastrophic stalking incident in her recent past. A first-class seat to Paris, several glasses of ros\u00e9, and a brooding Italian seatmate (filed in her phone as Seat F) upend that careful little life. Sasha lands without his number, accidentally cc\u2019s roughly one hundred Seraphina executives in her drunken search for him, and then does the only sensible thing left. She hires the detective who once saved her life.<\/p>\n

That detective is Wes Dane, who has since traded his magnifying glass for a Brooklyn food truck called Natural Born Griller. He has a dimple that could level a city block, an apron that has its own fan club, and unfinished business with Sasha that neither of them is ready to name. Game on.<\/p>\n

A Casting Director Who Couldn\u2019t Cast Her Own Heart<\/h2>\n

The pleasure of Sasha is that she is never simply \u201cthe heroine.\u201d She is observant in ways that are both funny and exhausting, sizing up every stranger for a role they don\u2019t know they are auditioning for. Underneath the bob and the bloodred manicure is a woman who once climbed out of a window to save herself and has been quietly trying to climb back into the world ever since.<\/p>\n

What Williams gets right about Sasha:<\/p>\n

Her professional sharpness is real, not a Pinterest aesthetic. The casting industry detail is specific and slightly cynical, clearly written by someone who has either lived it or interviewed people who have.
\nHer depression and agoraphobic tendencies are written with restraint. There is no neat speech about healing. She just keeps making slightly braver choices.
\nThe Afro-Latina identity thread is handled with honesty. Sasha admits to feeling like a fraud in Dominican spaces, and Williams lets her sit with that discomfort instead of resolving it with a tidy bow.<\/p>\n

The Slow Burn Hiding Behind a Spatula<\/h2>\n

Wes is where the romance economy of this book really pays out. He is the rare male lead who reads as actually attentive rather than performatively attentive. And he notices that Sasha runs hot when she is anxious. He keeps a chewed pencil from their first case years ago. He calls her at three in the morning because he knows she is already awake. The intimacy is in the inventory of small things, and Williams clearly understands that this is the currency that sells a slow burn.<\/p>\n

The dual point of view pulls real weight here. Watching Wes silently lose his mind while Sasha chases a ghost across two continents is the kind of secondhand longing romance readers signed up for in the first place. He is also surprisingly tender about his own life. The food truck pivot, the dying father, the toxic mother with a Facebook-Boomer smile and a knife behind it. Williams lets him be soft without making him a teddy bear.<\/p>\n

A Story That Knows the Rulebook, and Bends a Few Pages<\/h2>\n

Structurally, the novel runs on a clever engine. The missed-connection hunt is the surface puzzle, but the deeper plot is about Sasha learning the difference between fantasy and feeling<\/a>. The viral email mishap is genuinely funny and gives Williams an excuse to drop in some of the book\u2019s sharpest comic interludes. The replies from Seraphina employees worldwide are almost worth the cover price by themselves.<\/p>\n

A few craft notes worth flagging:<\/p>\n

The chapter titles do a lot of work, and most of them land. \u201cSuperhero Cinderella\u201d and \u201cSalvation in a Stranger\u201d are little gems.
\nWilliams threads in epistolary touches (emails, voice notes, internal monologues in italics) that keep the pacing buoyant.
\nThe Brooklyn geography is specific. Fort Greene, Flatbush, Prospect Heights, and the food festival circuit feel like actual neighborhoods with actual people, not generic backdrops.<\/p>\n

Williams at the Wheel<\/h2>\n

Tia Williams writes like she is sitting across from you at brunch, two mimosas deep, and absolutely not lowering her voice. Her prose is busy in the best sense, packed with side jokes about Cardi B, Issa and Lawrence, Cosmopolitan coverlines, and the strange economics of dating in your thirties when half your friends are on round two. The references occasionally arrive thick and fast, and a few may date the book quickly. That is a trade-off the author seems comfortable with, and frankly it is what gives the novel its pulse. The romantic tension is sharp without tipping into purple, and when the leads finally let themselves feel something, the scenes carry the restraint that makes the eventual release feel earned.<\/p>\n

Where the Wheels Wobble a Little<\/h2>\n

In the interest of an honest read, a few small things keep The Missed Connection by Tia Williams<\/em> from being airtight:<\/p>\n

The middle stretch sags slightly. The investigation loops on similar beats for a few chapters longer than the story needs.
\nThe Wes family subplot arrives with a lot of heat and resolves a little quickly. A particularly brutal scene with his mother deserved more room to breathe.
\nSeasoned romance readers will likely guess the central pivot well before the characters do. Williams seems aware of this and treats the reveal more as a thematic punchline than a shock, which works. Just barely.
\nA handful of the chapter titles strain for edginess when the chapters themselves are doing fine on their own.<\/p>\n

None of these are dealbreakers. They are the small frictions that keep a strong book from being a perfect one.<\/p>\n

How It Sits Beside Her Earlier Work<\/h2>\n

For longtime Tia Williams readers, The Missed Connection by Tia Williams<\/em> feels like a sister to Seven Days in June<\/em>, only lighter on its feet. It carries more of the rom-com sparkle of The Perfect Find<\/em> (now the Netflix film starring Gabrielle Union) than the literary heft of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde<\/em>. If you came to her work through The Accidental Diva<\/em> or her YA titles like Audre & Bash Are Just Friends<\/em><\/a> and It Chicks<\/em>, this one rides closer to the romantic comedy lane. The trauma backstory keeps it grounded, but it does not weigh the story down.<\/p>\n

Who Will Eat This Up<\/h2>\n

This book will sing for you if:<\/p>\n

You like slow-burn romance<\/a> with mutual pining and real-world stakes.
\nYou want Black love stories that take their leads seriously as professionals, not as accessories to the romance.
\nYou enjoy chatty, pop-culture-saturated narration with bite.
\nYou can sit with mental health as a recurring theme rather than a side note.<\/p>\n

It may not land as well if you prefer clean genre lines or want a fully closed-door read.<\/p>\n

If You Loved This, Try These Next<\/h2>\n

Seven Days in June<\/em> by Tia Williams, for the author\u2019s own emotionally richer back catalog.
\nPeople We Meet on Vacation<\/em><\/a> by Emily Henry, for friends-to-lovers banter with a travel hook.
\nThe Wedding Date<\/em> by Jasmine Guillory, name-checked inside the novel itself, for fake-dating energy and big-hearted charm.
\nHoney and Spice<\/em><\/a> by Bolu Babalola, for sharp dialogue and Black love stories with literary ambition.
\nThe Stand-In<\/em> by Lily Chu, for mistaken-identity romance and dual cultural identity threading.
\nYinka, Where Is Your Huzband?<\/em> by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn, for matchmaking chaos and warm female friendships.<\/p>\n

Closing Thought<\/h2>\n

The Missed Connection by Tia Williams<\/em> knows what it is and what its readers want, then sneaks in a little more than they bargained for. It is funny, loud, sometimes a little messy, and it makes a quietly serious argument for the kind of love that does not need an accent or a first-class seat attached. Williams remains one of the most reliable voices in contemporary Black romance, and The Missed Connection by Tia Williams<\/em> is a worthy stop on her flight path.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have ever boarded a plane hoping for an empty middle and instead landed beside someone who rearranges your spinal column with one glance, The Missed Connection by Tia Williams will feel like a love letter to that exact six hours of in-flight delirium. Williams, the Brooklyn-based bestselling author of Seven Days in June […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6548"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6548\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}