Spotlight & Giveaway: Love and Hot Chicken by Mary Liza Hartong

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Mary Liza Hartong to HJ!

Hi Mary and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Love and Hot Chicken!

Hey, y’all!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

This book is a hilarious southern tale of family, fried chicken, and two girls in love. It follows PJ Spoon as she returns home for her father’s funeral and sticks around to work at the local hot chicken shack. She falls for Boof, a newcomer with a dynamite singing voice, and steers clear of her grumpy manager, Linda. When the founder of Chickie Shak Enterprises proposes a beauty pageant between the female employees, chaos ensues.
 

Please share your favorite line(s) or quote from this book:

“Driving to the church, we talk only of finger foods. Delilah Fisher-Trapper’s pimento-cheese bites, Trumpet Williams’s pot stickers. Sometimes it’s easier to discuss the pig in the blanket than the elephant in the room.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• You could say it all started in Kindergarten. Or, more specifically, with the Kindergarten play. Clad in a straw hat with the price tag dangling off the brim, I played Minnie Pearl, the famous southern comedienne. “What do you get when you cross a cocker spaniel, a poodle, and a rooster?” I declared to the audience. “A cock-a-poodle-doo!” Thus began my lifelong love of southern humor.
• I continued to perform—school plays, college improv, etc—and continued to write. In the winter of February of 2020, just before the pandemic hit, I began working on “Love and Hot Chicken.” My goal was to bring the specific, silly, ragtag humor of home—of Minnie Pearl and country music—to a larger work. When Covid hit, I was forced to examine what really mattered to me. What did I want to create? What did I want to cast off? Writing something joyful, silly, romantic, and deep-fried felt like the thing to do.
• This book is definitely weird! There are phrases in it like, “rodent-like” and “port-a-john” and “southern mamma claw.” Strangely, I think this willingness to be weird is exactly what makes the book work.

What first attracts your Hero to the Heroine and vice versa?

The main character, PJ, is an introvert. In fact, she’s so introverted her mamma calls her “Patsy DeCline” when it comes to social invitations. Boof, on the other hand, is a born talker. She’s a waitress, an empath, and a lover of chitting and chatting. I liked the idea of a romance between these two for so many reasons. Boof helps bring PJ out of her shell, PJ treats Boof with a quiet tenderness she’s never encountered before, and the two of them simply have fun.

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to romances and rom coms is when there’s not much evidence as to WHY the two people like each other. Don’t just give us furtive glances! Give us goofiness! The best romances I’ve seen (including my own–hi, Bridget!) are those in which the lovers simply get a kick out of each other. In writing this book, I wanted to show PJ and Boof having fun together in a way that was more than just cursory.

Did any scene have you blushing, crying or laughing while writing it? And Why?

The CEO character, Mr. Puddin, is definitely the one who had me laughing the most. Every time he enters a scene he brings this over the top, oblivious, goofy energy to the page. As I got to know his character, I enjoyed decking him out with bad plastic surgery and purple suits. Simply put, he’s a hoot.

Here’s a little excerpt:

Mr. Puddin melts onstage in one hot bounce. He’s sporting his usual purple. And is it just me or is that a new chin? For a man who’s mostly pig cadaver at this point, he sure seems alive, prancing this way and that with a big, white smile. I wonder what he was doing all this time. Maybe he was waiting, like all of us, for something new to come along. And then, one day, he up and decided to make it.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he caws, “Cupcakes and stud muffins, ruffles and rifles, welcome to the first annual Chickie Shak Hot Chicken Beauty Tour Finals! What began as a nightmare I had in my hot tub has grown into a fabulous competition, an event exceeding all my wildest dreams. ”

Readers should read this book….

Read this book if you need a good laugh. If you’ve been longing for a joyful queer love story. If you’ve watched “Sweet Home Alabama” so many times you can say it by heart.
 

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have in the works?

Right now I’m working on a coming of age story. It shares a lot of DNA with “Love and Hot Chicken” in terms of humor and setting, but this time around the characters are teenagers. I have so many crisp memories of high school—good, bad, awkward—that are proving oodles of fun to write about.
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A Print copy of LOVE AND HOT CHICKEN by by Mary Liza Hartong

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: How does this book conjure the notion of home? Did it remind you of your hometown? What/who here feels the most familiar?

 
a Rafflecopter giveaway

 
 

Excerpt from Love and Hot Chicken:

The next morning when I go to brush my teeth, I notice a pair of old hoop earrings by the sink. Funny sight next to the sea spray of my spit, the lone ranger of my toothbrush. I cradle the loops in my palm. No bigger than macaroni. Modest you might say if you were polite, which none of us are in my family. The gold paint’s wearing off the brass like a bad spray tan. All this to say, they are not mine. Mamma must have left them the last time she was here. Either took them out to fight with Aunt Wanda or left them like a prayer for me to find. I hate to admit it, but I think they’re kinda pretty. Or purty, as Mamma would say.
“Oh, what the hell.”
Glistening in my shitty brass earrings, I ride to work.

There’s not much to Pennywhistle, but there’s enough. You got your post office, your public library, your roller rink for special occasions. Your Piggly Wiggly, your Half-Off Pass Away Depot. We’re twenty miles from Memphis, two steps from the Loosahatchie River, and within shouting distance of anything you really need in this life or the next. That is, unless you break your leg or long for a Frappuccino. Then you gotta get your ass to the city. Mostly we stay put, falling asleep to the sound of the train and waking up to the rusty water sprinklers going skeet, skeet, skeet.

My morning ride takes about six minutes, so I really get to take in the scenery. The main road through town is peppered with neighbors hollering at one another about garden gnomes and plastic deer. Little wishing wells clogged up with cigarettes. Big glass balls sitting proud on concrete pedestals. Dogs that belong to nobody in particular. A regular Walt Disney World, if I do say so.

Tennessee’s long but she’s also skinny, so from here to Nashville don’t take but a few hours of cruising past XXX billboards and blown out tires. Shoot, that’s a pretty drive. Nothing but Jimmy Buffett and Jesus on the radio. Growing up, we’d go every summer to see Lee Ray’s Auntie June, a psychic ventriloquist with half a dozen boyfriends and a pet snake. Sweet old thing. Lee Ray’s mamma lost her license due to some unpaid parking tickets, so Daddy would drive us. He made the whole thing historical, educational.
“Summer school starts right here, right now,” he’d announce as we filled up the tank at the Snap Sak. We learned things like how to call a chickadee or which state parks you can’t piss in. My favorite fact was and remains that our state animal is the raccoon. Daddy thought Tennessee looked a bit like a scrawny old raccoon. He’d point out all the cities on the map and say what part they represented.
“Lookee there. Memphis is the nose and we’s the whiskers.”
“What’s so special ’bout that?” I’d ask. “Can’t we flip it? Then we’d be the tail.”
“What’s so special? Don’t you know what whiskers do?”
“No.”
“What do they do?” Lee Ray’d press.
Daddy would take a dramatic pause, gazing off into the horizon in a way that assured us he knew everything there was to know about Tennessee and the world that had sprung up around it. The lines around his eyes boasted adventures. The knots in his hands, secrets. Just when we couldn’t wait any longer, he’d spit his tobacco out the window with a flourish and tell us what whiskers did.
“Well, whiskers, they feel things.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

When PJ Spoon returns home for her beloved daddy’s funeral, she doesn’t expect to stick around. Why abandon her PhD program at Vanderbilt for the humble charms of her hometown, Pennywhistle, Tennessee? She tells herself it’s to help her brokenhearted Mamma, but PJ’s own heart’s not doing too good either. She impulsively takes a job as a fry cook at Pennywhistle’s beloved Chickie Shak, where locals gather for Nashville-style hot chicken.

Then fate shakes up PJ’s life again. While the town rallies around the terribly retro and terribly fun Hot Chicken Pageant, PJ finally notices her cute redheaded coworker Boof, a singer-songwriter with a talent as striking as her curly hair.

While PJ and Boof fall for each other, Boof’s search for her birth mother—a Pennywhistle native—catapults the budding couple into a mystery that might be better left unsolved. When the Chickie Shak pageant takes off, old rivalries and new friendships in Pennywhistle lead to unexpected fireworks, and new beginnings.
Book Links: Amazon | B&N |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Mary Liza Hartong lives and writes in her hometown of Nashville. She’s an alumna of Harpeth Hall, Dartmouth College, and the University College Cork via Fulbright Grant. Her work has been published in a variety of magazines including the Nashville Scene and StyleBlueprint. When she’s not writing, you can find her combing yard sales for treasures with her fiancee, Bridget.
Website | Twitter | Instagram | GoodReads |