Spotlight & Giveaway: Love Me Like a Rock Song by Shelly Jay Shore

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Shelly Jay Shore to HJ!

Hi Shelly and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Love Me Like a Rock Song!

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

 
What would you do if the love of your life ditched you one night before your wedding and two weeks before you were supposed to record an album full of love songs for her?

If you’re Delilah Cohen, the answer is obvious: Turn what was supposed to be a honeymoon road trip into a cross-country songwriting sprint, fueled by spite, queer glam rock, and gas station coffee. The trip takes an unexpected turn when Delilah meets Emmett Stein, who happens to be going in the same direction…so why not invite Emmett along?

Only Emmett has a secret of their own: They’re a golem, a construct right out of a Jewish folktale. With their creator dead, Emmett’s last task is to unmake the magic animating them. But if they’re heading for the end of the road anyway, why not take the scenic route?

It doesn’t take long for Delilah and Emmett to find themselves falling for each other even as their very different deadlines loom on the horizon. Sparks fly, secrets pile up, and decisions have to be made, and as the miles go by, Delilah realizes that she’s not sure if she’s writing the wrong album all over again—or if she’s finally found the right songs after all.
 

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

Delilah trusts her hands so much more than she has ever trusted her head, and sometimes she wonders if her hands could make music without her—­ just her fingers and her strings, without all the mess of her mind complicating everything that her body seems to know so instinctively how to make beautiful.

There’s probably a song there, but then, there’s probably a song in everything if she’s willing to sit down and get through the misery of looking at it. It’s like healing a tattoo—­getting through the messy discomfort of pus and blood and plasma until the itching skin peels away and leaves only vibrant color and clear lines, permanent and lovely.

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

• I mapped out the entire itinerary for Delilah and Emmett’s road trip—including stops that didn’t make it onto the page! I love planning road trips, especially when there’s a theme, and figuring out the kinds of places that Delilah would have chosen, based on her love of music and queer history, made it even more fun. (And now I have a bucket list for myself!)
• I originally described this book to a friend as “The Golem of Prague” meets “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” meets “Almost Famous” meets “Thelma and Louise,” and I stand by that description.
• Delilah’s cats are named after my agent’s kitties! Everyone keep an eye out for Cleo, Gertrude, and Edith.
• There is in fact an official Love Me Like a Rock Song playlist! You can check it out on the Random House Spotify account.

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

Delilah is attracted to Emmett’s kindness! She’s in the music industry and is very used to people who are nice to her face and shady behind her back. Emmett is the first genuinely kind person she’s met in a long time. (The very, very pretty eyes don’t hurt, either.)

Emmett is attracted to Delilah’s fearlessness and spontaneity. They’ve lived under very strict rules and restrictions, and Delilah’s “fuck it!” energy is both shocking and incredibly exciting for them.

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

One of my favorite things about the book is the epistolary elements—social media posts, interview and article snippets, podcast quotes, song lists, text messages, notes characters write to each other and themselves, voicemails, journal entries, etc. The fictional “Always Here” podcast, which Delilah and her best friend Iris start together and Iris continues on her own, is a sort of dreamy mix of queer history, social commentary, and love letters to the queer community and queer spaces, and writing those pieces was always really emotional.

—

“Smith: There’s something liminal about a queer bookstore, don’t you think?

Gold: Is this going to be a joke about fairy realms?

Smith: It wasn’t, but now it almost feels like a missed opportunity. [laughter] What I mean is that a queer bookstore is like a pocket of time out of time. Space out of space. Separate from reality, you know? Where every connection is somehow both so unreal you’re not sure it happened, yet also so much realer and more true than anything you’ve felt before. There’s a stripping of armor. The lines are thinner—­the lines we draw around ourselves to keep ourselves safe.

Cohen: Not to lean too hard on the joke you weren’t making, but I thought that was supposed to be what made those fairy rings so dangerous. Right? You let your guard down, you taste the food—whatever that’s going to be a metaphor for, I don’t know, sapphic poetry or Baldwin or something—­and then you can’t leave again.

Smith: Is it that you can’t leave, or is that just what they say, when the truth is that you don’t want to? All I’m saying is that the veil is thinner there. It’s inherently a threshold. How many of us are the same person within the walls of a radically queer space that we are outside one? You walk inside and you get to make a choice between who you’ll be from one step to another, the moment you cross the boundary. Everywhere else, you can choose how you want to be seen, to a point anyway. How you want someone to see you. But you step into those stores, lined with pages and pages of history and story and love, there’s something in your soul that’ll turn visible no matter what. Something that calls out to be recognized.

Cohen: As what?

Smith: Well, you tell me. You walk through the door of one of those places, the little bell rings, the person at the counter looks up and sees you. What do you want them to see?

Cohen: [after a pause] I don’t know.

Smith: [gently] You do, love. We all do.

— Always Here with Delilah Cohen and Iris Gold, season 2, episode 7: “Space Stations,” featuring Professor Aja Smith, astrophysicist, poet, and author of Made of Stardust: Speculative Futures of Queer Identity”

Readers should read this book….

If they adore road trips, folklore, strangers-to-friends-to-lovers vibes, morbid humor, social media and podcast snippets, music-inspired stories (with their own soundtracks!), mental illness and plus-size rep, queer history, and adventures that start out based on spite and end up fueled by something much sweeter.

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

I’m currently taking a pivot away from rom-coms and dipping my toes into horror romance! I am a huge scaredy-cat so it’s definitely an adventure in researching and reading comps while hiding under a blanket, but this particular story (demonic cults! vampires! rape culture! the inherent horror of the basement of your mystical academy’s library!) demanded a much darker approach than the last two books. I’m excited!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: One (1) finished copy of LOVE ME LIKE A ROCK SONG for a US winner!

To enter Giveaway, please share this post on your Socials and Leave a comment below to this Q: Would you stay at a bed and breakfast run by two vampires?

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✨ Giveaway closes 3 days from the date this post is published.  
 

Excerpt from Love Me Like a Rock Song:

Track 1:
Delilah

TMZ [@TMZ]
BREAKING—Insiders report that singer-songwriter duo Sam Knight and Delilah Cohen have called it quits, less than 24 hours before their wedding! Get the scoop

Us Weekly [@usweekly]
There goes the bride??? Sam Knight hints at split from fiancée and songwriting partner Delilah Cohen on Instagram.

BuzzFeed [@BuzzFeed]
No statement yet from Sam Knight or Delilah Cohen on their reported breakup, just hours before they were scheduled to head down the aisle. Here’s everything we know about the rumors so far

Iris Gold [@goldeniris]
y’all PLEASE stop tagging me in posts about sam & delilah’s wedding, i am so obviously not going to say anything until they say something themselves!!!

It’s seven in the morning, the day after she should have been married, and Delilah Cohen is trying, and failing, to convince the woman at the rental office to hand over the keys to the honeymoon van.

Her fingers itch for the cigarettes she quit smoking when she was twenty-two. Six years on, the cravings still hit her anytime she’s emotional or antsy or hungover or high, which is most of the time, one way or another.

Today she’s emotional and hungover as hell, vodka-sweat prickling half-dried on her skin under the cardigan she threw on against the October air. In a universe with any kind of justice, she’d still have nicotine gum in her purse. Instead, she drums her fingertips against the counter like it’s a keyboard, tapping out a silent arpeggio of irritation and anxiety as she tries to make sense of the paperwork spread out in front of her.

The honeymoon road trip was Delilah’s idea, born out of a mix of nostalgia and romanticism. Sam wanted a tropical vacation, the kind they’d taken throughout their relationship: the two of them lounging on a beach, all skin and sun and the kind of sweet blended drinks that made Delilah’s teeth ache. Sam always befriended the bartenders as soon as they arrived, her Hollywood looks and natural charm more than enough to get an extra shot of rum poured down the straws of her piña coladas, and Delilah got to reap the benefits—for all she usually regretted it once the sugar and alcohol started adding up. Those vacations were always beautiful, luxurious, and picture-perfect, until the flash of the sun off the ocean turned into the flash of cameras from the paparazzi. Sam’s PA, Brooke—never far out of reach—would shoo them away, but it always took Delilah too long to relax again, no matter how many times Sam told her to stop looking over her shoulder. Even after five years together, Delilah never got used to the way paparazzi flocked to Sam like the gulls that circled the beach.

Delilah empathized with the birds. There were times when she too felt like she was constantly looking for dropped French fries and liquor-soaked fruit, for an ounce of attention.

Sam, music industry heiress that she was, could brush them away with the ease of long practice, projecting effortless indifference even as she tilted her head or adjusted her posture to ensure they captured the most flattering shot for whatever tabloid had managed to track them down.

“You know you’re just rewarding them for stalking you,” Delilah had said once, brushing sand off the bottom of her feet in the entryway of their suite.

“Photos sell albums, babe,” Sam had told her with a wink as she pulled her bikini top over her head, laughing her sunshine laugh when Delilah wobbled off her flip-flops. “And don’t we have better things to be doing than worrying about them?”

But unlike Sam, who made her People debut at six months old, Delilah grew up in the sweetness of anonymity. Her vacations were just her, her mom, their ancient Subaru, and the interstate. Together they would pick a line on the paper map in the glove compartment and carve a path between cheap motels and diners and world’s largest objects. She would tuck her legs beneath her in the back seat, watching the lines on the highway as the Subaru followed them toward what felt like limitless potential.

Delilah and her mom had no plans, no assistant-planned itineraries, no travel agents—the polar opposite of Sam’s world of all-inclusive resorts. Delilah had been determined to show Sam that different didn’t mean bad. “You’ve been showing me your world since we got together,” she said, twirling a lock of Sam’s hair around one finger as they lay together in bed, passing potential honeymoon destinations back and forth. “It’ll be an adventure.”

An adventure for just the two of them, she didn’t say. No cameras, no constantly looking over their shoulders, just the open road and the endless sky.

Getting Sam to agree had felt like a tiny win in the planning of a wedding that was spiraling out of control. What had started out as an intimate, rustic gathering of family and friends had ballooned into something decadent and massive pretty much the instant Sam’s mother had gotten their wedding planner’s phone number. Delilah may have been overruled on flowers and venues and whether Liza Minelli and Faye Dunaway could be seated at the same table as her aunts, but the honeymoon was just for them.

At least, it was until Sam told Vogue about their plans, and suddenly they were drowning in offers of free luxury camper vans with built-in showers, all theirs for the low, low price of five grid photos and ten story posts and an endorsement tag. Delilah had put her foot down as much as she could. “It’s not a real road trip unless you have to actually stop to pee,” she said, crossing off three more potential companies. Sam threw up her hands and gave Delilah carte blanche to choose her favorite, and they’d signed a contract for a refurbished camper van that balanced Delilah’s love of kitsch and vintage nostalgia with Sam’s love of social media aesthetics.

The note Sam left had shut the door on more than just the honeymoon van, but it’s the contract for that van that Delilah is staring at now that might push her back over the edge. Apparently, it’s no marital bliss, no honeymoon, no service.

It should probably help that the girl behind the counter looks about as mortified by the situation as Delilah feels, but it really doesn’t. She has a name tag shaped like the Mystery Machine clipped to her electric blue polo. The label reads, Hi, my name is Jenna! How can I help you take an adventure today?

Delilah would like to adventure directly into a cave and never come out. Except then Sam would win.

“Look,” she says, “I get it. The influencer contract is scrapped, whatever. Can’t I still just make an actual reservation? With a credit card? Like a normal person?”

Jenna chews her lip. She looks about twenty. Delilah feels sort of bad for sweating vodka all over her nice clean counter. “I don’t know if I’m allowed to just change things around like that,” the girl says. “It’s a different system.”

Delilah will not cry in front of this child. She’s sure she’s got some dignity left, somewhere. Probably stuffed at the bottom of her bag, crumpled up next to old receipts and expired granola bars and half a bottle of Xanax.

She casts a help me look over her shoulder at the three women sitting in the little office’s waiting area, clustered in the aggressively yellow chairs that clash with the counter girl’s uniform like an eclectic entourage. Her mother, manager, and best friend exchange a silent glance, and then Alex gets to her feet in one long, elegant movement, sliding into the space beside Delilah with the grace of a panther. The lack of incessant buzzing from the phone in her hand must mean she’s finally silenced it—a relief and a terror. Delilah doesn’t want to think about how bad the notifications must have been for even the world’s most unflappable manager to shut them up in order to handle the damage control.

“I’m sure we can work this out,” Alex says with a scarlet-lipped smile, and Jenna goes a bright and predictable pink. Where Delilah is wearing yesterday’s makeup, her curves hidden under an oversized sweater she found in a bargain bin, Alex is all sleek black clothes and knife-sharp eyeliner, her red hair swept into a flawless fishtail braid, skin dewy with a ten-part skin-care routine she somehow found time to do even after spending the whole night talking Delilah down off a ledge. She looks exactly like her power lesbian reputation, radiating the competence that lets her ring up any record label in LA and cow them into submission. Mystery Machine Jenna doesn’t stand a chance.

“Why don’t you go get a manager and we’ll see if we can come to an agreement, mm?”

Jenna lets out a little squeak and nods, seemingly unable to wrench her eyes away from Alex’s predator-like gaze as she backs up into the office behind her, the beaded curtain in the doorway rustling shut in her wake.

As she disappears behind the glittering beads, Delilah says, “I think you woke up another one.”

“It’s not even a challenge anymore,” Alex says. “I’m getting jaded in my old age.” She eyes Delilah. “Is it worth my telling you that I think this is ridiculous?”

“People who get left at the altar take their honeymoons alone all the time.”

“I think that usually applies to people drowning their sorrows in all-inclusive booze for a week,” Alex says. “Not the ones going full Chris McCandless by Pier 1.” She gestures around the little rental office, with its bright, cheerful posters of airbrushed couples and groups in various poses around refurbished vintage vans—interiors with soft white linens and cozy pillows, exterior shots with fairy lights and campfires and skylights open to the stars.

“I think what Alex means,” Delilah’s mom says, joining them at the counter with Iris close on her heels, “is that we just want to make sure you’re not trying to avoid the situation.”

Delilah rubs at the indentation on her finger where her engagement ring had been—up until she tried to throw it off her hotel balcony the night before. She thinks her mom rescued it, but she’s not sure where it is now. The vodka is mostly out of her system, but she still feels like she’s reeling, unsteady and unmoored, even with Alex’s steady presence at her side, the warm arm Iris tucks around her shoulders, the reassuring hand her mom runs over her messy hair.

“I’m not avoiding,” she says, because she’s never been good at lying directly to their faces. It still comes out more snappishly than she means it to. “It’s not like I think taking this trip is going to make it so that the last twenty-four hours didn’t happen.”

The three of them exchange another look, unsubtly somewhere between exasperation and concern.

Twenty-four hours ago, she knew exactly where her life was going, and they were right there with her. She was marrying bold, brilliant, beautiful Sam Knight—Delilah’s songwriting partner for the past six years and her everything partner for the past five. Sam Knight, with her un-ironic love of horrible action movie parodies and her seemingly medical inability to speak in a whisper and her contagious laugh and her habit of throwing food away three days before the expiration date out of an overabundance of caution.

Sam Knight, whose last name got them their first contract and their first album into production. Sam Knight, who knew the music world inside and out, who had been the driving power behind their shared career ever since—the front-and-center focus of every photo shoot, the loudest voice in every interview, the leading vocals when they recorded.

It always drove Alex up a wall that Sam constantly put herself in the spotlight and treated Delilah like a backup dancer. Then again, Alex is Delilah’s manager—it’s her job to get annoyed about that kind of thing. But Delilah never minded, not really. All she’s ever wanted to do is make music. She’s never kidded herself that she’d be where she is now without Sam’s connections and formal music education and classic pop-star looks, even with Alex’s sharklike approach to contracts and the producers she has under her Louboutin heels. Rags-to-riches Hollywood stories might sell in movies, but Delilah’s spent enough time in industry circles by now to know they’re not nearly as common as people think. There’s always an uncle in the business to get a demo into the right hands, or enough family money to pay for the best of the best music tutors, or a friend of the family who just happens to be a studio executive, and Oh, we’re sure no one will mind if you record, and why don’t we lend you a sound mixer while you’re here?

Without Sam, Delilah’s just a nobody from Boston with perfect pitch, an unhealthy attachment to her dead dad’s guitar, and a lucky spark of genius with a pen and a piano. It’s one thing to know it, but it’s another to be so aggressively, humiliatingly reminded of it, to not even be able to use her own name to get a reservation to rent a camper van when the company could have had Sam Knight instead.

Alex sighs, tapping the side of her phone against the countertop. It hasn’t left her hand since yesterday, when the wedding’s abrupt cancellation leaked online. Delilah’s own phone has been relatively quiet, but she thinks that’s because the first thing Alex did when the news broke was lock her out of all her public social media accounts and threaten to confiscate her phone altogether if Delilah didn’t stop trying to guess the replacement passwords. She’s always been a glutton for punishment, and even though she’s been in the public eye for the last six years, she’s never learned not to read the fucking comments.

“Look,” Alex says, “I’m not unsympathetic to the fuck it, I’m out energy you have going on here. But unless you’re still planning to record an album that screams love letter to my new wife in two weeks, we’re either going to have to cancel the studio and pull the lawyers in to rework your contract or you’ve got a hell of a job on your hands.”

“Then it’s a good thing I work best under pressure.”

“There’s pressure and then there’s rewriting a full album in two weeks,” Alex says. “I’m trying to be on your side here, babe, but I don’t know how you’re planning to do that while you’re channeling your inner Jack Kerouac.”

“More like my inner Thelma and Louise,” Delilah mutters, but she lifts her chin anyway, realizing too late and with a twist in her stomach that it’s her best impression of Sam—haughty, confident, and brimming with don’t you know who I am? energy. “Besides, I’ve done it before.”

Iris’s arm tightens slightly around her shoulders, and her mom’s hand drops from her hair to the back of her neck, squeezing firmly in what’s either solidarity or rebuke, or both. It’s a not-so-subtle reminder that the last time she wrote a full album within that kind of time frame had been during a full-blown manic episode. Delilah had turned that album in on time, but she’d also gotten herself almost $5,000 in credit card debt and scared her closest loved ones half to death in the process.

Not her finest moment.

The thinning of Alex’s lips suggests that she’s thinking along the same lines. “It’s not your ability to get the job done I’m worried about, kid,” she begins, but she’s interrupted by the rustling of the beaded curtain behind the desk as Jenna-the-counter-girl returns with a bright expression, a handful of papers, and—Delilah’s heart leaps—a jingling set of keys.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

When Delilah Cohen’s much more famous fiancée leaves her at the altar right before Delilah is supposed to start recording her first solo album, she finds herself with a notebook full of love songs that no longer make sense. Picking up a hitchhiker two hours into the road trip that was supposed to be her honeymoon seems as good a way as any to get her groove back. The last thing she expects is to start falling for her mysterious new passenger, but what’s more inspiring than a rebound with a built-in expiration date?

But there’s more to Emmett than meets the eye. Emmett is a golem, a human-ish being of Jewish mythology who was created from clay to serve a now-deceased master. No longer needed, their final task is to make their way back to the California cave where they were made in order to undo the magic that brought them to life in the first place. But the longer Emmett spends with Delilah—who has plenty of secrets and insecurities of her own—as they cross the country to visit historical queer locales from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, the more their ending feels like something to fight, rather than something set in stone.

As the California coast brings Delilah’s writing deadline—and Emmett’s fate—closer with every passing mile, Delilah has to decide just what song it is she wants to write…and whether writing the album of a lifetime is worth losing a love she never expected to find.

Part road trip romcom, part epistolary exploration of America’s vibrant queer culture, and all a love letter to the phrase “it’s about the journey, not the destination,” Love Me Like a Rock Song is a glorious love story about discovering who we are and what we want, and what it means to be human.
Book Links: Amazon | B&N | iTunes | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Shelly Jay Shore is a writer, digital strategist, and nonprofit fundraiser. She writes for anxious queer millennials, sufferers of Eldest Daughter Syndrome, recovering summer camp counselors, and anyone struggling with the enormity of being a person trying to make the world kinder, softer, and more tender. Their debut novel, Rules for Ghosting, was a national bestseller and named one of The New York Times Book Review’s Best Romances of the Year. She lives in Western Massachusetts, where she reads a truly alarming number of books, single-handedly sustains the local coffee industry, and attempts to wrangle two large dogs and two small children.
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