Spotlight & Giveaway: Songs of Summer by Jane L. Rosen

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Jane L. Rosen to HJ!

Hi Jane and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Songs of Summer!

Hello Summer Readers!
 

Please summarize the book for the readers here:

Maggie May Wheeler is living her best life-at thirty, she has big plans for her vintage record shop and is about to be engaged to her childhood best friend. But when she stumbles across a letter she wrote to her future self when she was thirteen, she realizes it may not be enough. The letter ignites a desire to find her birth mother and discover where she really belongs.
Her search takes her to idyllic Fire Is-land, where her birth mother is a guest at a wedding. As Maggie spies on her biological family, she’s caught between diving into their chaotic lives and returning to her comfortable world. Things heat up when a charming local makes her an offer to crash the wedding as his date.
Is it the island’s magic, the whirlwind of the weekend, or the thrill of a fake beau that has her rethinking everything? Swept away by every love song she hears, Maggie must decide what is best for her future.
 

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

“You know I’ve spent near sixty years on this glorified sandbar. No matter where I go or what I do all roads lead me back to this spit of sand….This is our Rome.”

Please share a few Fun facts about this book…

Each of the fifty-two chapters in my latest novel, Songs of Summer, begins with a song title, so curating a companion playlist for the book felt like an organic extension of the story. Early readers are loving the immersive experience of listening along—which is exactly what I had hoped for. View the setlist here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5wrgjlffB08CoCRFTciQKE?

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

While Maggie and Matt have an instant connection, it is their shared love of music (Matt a reporter for Rolling Stone & Maggie a record store owner) that keeps their banter bubbling. Its anyones guess if they will become friends or lovers.

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

Any scene that the patriarch of all three of my Fire Island stories, She Silver is in has me laughing. Sometimes out loud.

Readers should read this book….

If they want to laugh, cry, escape, bask in community, delve into family drama, visit an idyllic care-free summer island, sing and dance along and just fall in love.

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

Lisa Rinna (RHOBH, Melrose Place, Days of Our Lives) has optioned my third novel, A Shoe Story, for a feature film. More info on that here: https://deadline.com/2025/05/a-shoe-story-movie-lisa-rinna-development-1236392556/
For info on all upcoming news in my life, please follow me on social!
 

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: A set of signed copies of all three of my books set on Fire Island: On Fire Island, Seven Summer Weekends and Songs of Summer .

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: What song means summer to you?

 
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Excerpt from Songs of Summer:

Prologue
Maggie May
Maggie May Wheeler had moved into the house with the big willow tree out back a few months before her tenth birthday. She didn’t want to leave the Main Street apartment over the record shop in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where she had spent the first decade of her life. She adored living over her parents’ store, loved going down the back stairs with her dad every morning before school to prepare to open. There, Maggie would sit on the stool behind the cash register eating an English muffin with peanut butter dripping from its nooks and crannies. She’d watch as the morning sun caused the words painted on the front window—MAGGIE MAY RECORDS—to dance across the hard wood floor while her dad, Hank Wheeler, got down to business.
Hank would methodically begin each day by opening the boxes from the day before. He liked to check out the new albums in the calm of the morning, contemplating the track list, the cover art, and the liner notes, before gently placing the record on the turntable and dropping the needle to play. The store carried every genre, so it was anyone’s guess whether Maggie would begin her day to the sound of OutKast singing “Hey Ya!” or Aretha Franklin calling for “Respect.”
“Can I have this dance, Maggie May?” her dad would ask when the rhythm moved him, and the two would spin or twist or twirl until Maggie’s mom came down to scoot her off to school.
Maggie’s mom and dad were older than the other kids’ parents, but it didn’t bother Maggie. She hadn’t even realized it until she was waiting in line at the start of second grade. Jill Rose’s mother studied Jenny Wheeler’s loose gray curls and remarked, “How nice that your grandma brought you on the first day.”
Maggie looked from Jill’s mom, with her miniskirt and shiny black hair, to the moms in front and behind her, and back to her own, and noted, for the first time, the difference in age between them. She asked her mom about it on the way home, and on that night, her parents sat her down and told her that she was adopted.
Soon afterward, Hank and Jenny Wheeler became fixated on the idea that it was unconventional for a child to live above a record store and spend so much time with adults. They became obsessed with giving Maggie a conventional upbringing in a house with neighbors and a backyard. Her parents wanted her to play outdoors with other kids, to spend her free time with the OutKast generation instead of Aretha’s, they’d explained. That, she understood. But even so, Maggie always associated the move with learning she was adopted.
Maggie was devastated by the thought of leaving the apartment over the record store, but not wanting to upset her parents, she didn’t object. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she had been on her best behavior since learning the big news, as if her mom and dad might give her back if she misbehaved. It was an absurd thought. Both Jenny and Henry adored their girl more than anything in the world, and she knew it.
From her bedroom window over the shop, Maggie could see beyond the treetops as far as the train station. She could tell when the 6:07 from Akron came in behind schedule and could count the alarms when the local fire house had a call. Once, she saw the biggest bully in her class, Kimberly Kahn, (nickname—Genghis) drop her ice cream cone on the sidewalk and burst into tears. After that, Maggie never feared Kimberly Kahn again.
None of this would be visible from the three-bedroom Victorian or colonial or ranch with neighbors and a yard that her parents were constantly combing the real estate section of the paper in search of. Nothing felt more boring to Maggie than neighbors and a backyard.
It was nearly a year later that Maggie first climbed the willow tree in the backyard of the pre-war Victorian she now reluctantly called home and spotted a neighboring kid that looked to be about her age. With her long ponytail tucked under her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame baseball cap and her overalls’ pockets stuffed with candy, she called out to him.
“Hello down there!”
“Hello up there,” the boy bellowed back, without missing a beat. “Want to see my turtle?”
She stepped onto to a lower branch that extended over the back fence into the boy’s yard, then fearlessly slid down it, landing with a thud on the other side. The boy, Jason Miller, looked at her like she was the coolest girl he had ever laid eyes on, even before she unloaded her pockets. Odds were, she was.
“Fun Dip?” she asked, adding “It’s Razz/Apple!”
“That’s my favorite flavor!” he gushed.
“Mine too!”
Maggie split the sticks, handing one to Jason, and from that day on, the two were inseparable.
Maggie and Jason waited at the bus stop together, where Maggie had once pummeled Emmett Pitler for hitting Jason with a rock-filled snowball. They waited for each other after school, when Maggie’s mom would shuttle them over to the record store to do their homework and help close: straightening the albums so they wouldn’t warp and making sure that customers didn’t accidentally put back Led Zeppelin under Z or Rod Stewart under R. Maggie’s dad would pay them in 45s and they would spend hours playing Name That Tune with their bounty on rainy weekends. Jason always lost but was just happy to be with Maggie. He was always happiest with Maggie.
Maggie and Jason’s birthdays were two days apart, May third and May fifth, so they made a tradition out of celebrating together on the fourth. They went all out with themes and decorations and music and food, especially the cake. For their tenth, the theme was May the Fourth Be with You (Jason’s brilliant idea); for their eleventh, Battle of the Boy Bands; and for their twelfth, High School Musical. By their thirteenth birthdays, Maggie declared that they were too old for backyard parties. Their parents organized a big family dinner instead. The “big” part referred to Jason’s side of the equation.
Jason Miller was sandwiched between two sisters and lived across the street from a whole other Miller clan, an aunt and uncle, who had five kids. Maggie’s dad would spend hours before their birthday parties pairing each guest to a record that matched their personality. Maggie would meticulously wrap the albums in the glossy gift wrap her mom had designed for the store—bright yellow paper covered in 45s with Maggie May Records printed on their tiny labels. Handing out the personalized party favors was Maggie’s favorite part of her birthday.
On the night of their thirteenth, Maggie and Jason climbed up the willow tree. (They spent so much time there that their dads had built a platform around the trunk for them to hang out on.) Maggie brought out two pens, a notebook, and a Ziploc bag.
“What age do you think is really grown up? Twenty-one?” she asked Jason.
“No way. I have a cousin who’s twenty-one, and he got a marble stuck up his nose on his last birthday.”
Maggie laughed. “What about twenty-five? That seems old.”
“I say thirty. Why do you want to know?”
“OK, thirty it is. Here.”
She handed him a piece of paper, a pen, and an envelope.
Maggie loved games. Jason did not. He rolled his eyes.
“It’s not a game. Not really. We’re writing letters to our future selves. I read about it in Seventeen magazine. Put down everything you hope to be by the time you’re thirty on your sheet and then seal it in the envelope. I’m gonna do the same thing, and when we’re thirty, we’ll come up here and read them out loud!”
He rolled his eyes again, but leaned back against the trunk and began. They both took the task very seriously, and nearly an hour later she put their envelopes in the Ziploc, sealed it tight, and wrote:
DO NOT OPEN UNTIL MAY 2025
Maggie shoved it into the hollow of the tree, Boo Radley style, and neither of them thought much about the contents of their letters again.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

A young woman crashes the wedding of the summer on Fire Island in search of her birth mother—and gets a whole lot more than she bargained for—in this warm, heart-stopping getaway from Jane L. Rosen

As featured in Parade ∙ Woman’s World ∙ Katie Couric Media ∙ The Nerd Daily ∙ and more!

Maggie May Wheeler is living her best life—at thirty, she has big plans for her vintage record shop and is about to be engaged to her childhood best friend. But when she stumbles across a letter she wrote to her future self when she was thirteen, she realizes it may not be enough. The letter ignites a desire to find her birth mother and discover where she really belongs.

Her search takes her to dreamy Fire Island, where her birth mother is a guest at a wedding. As Maggie spies on her biological family, she’s caught between diving into their chaotic lives and returning to her comfortable world. Things heat up when a charming local makes her an offer to crash the wedding as his date.

Is it the island’s magic, the whirlwind of the weekend, or the thrill of a fake beau that has her rethinking everything? Swept away by every love song she hears, Maggie must figure out where her heart truly lies.
Book Links:  Amazon | B&N | kobo | Google |
 
 

Meet the Author:

Jane L. Rosen is the author of six novels, Nine Women, One Dress, Eliza Starts a Rumor, A Shoe Story, On Fire Island Seven Summer Weekends and her upcoming release, Songs of Summer. She has a monthly column in the Fire Island and Great South Bay News called Cake Or Pie? where she whimsically interviews her fellow authors. She is also a screenwriter and New York Times, Tablet and Huffington Post contributor. She splits her time between the Hudson Valley and her beloved Fire Island, with her husband, her rescue pup Rosalita, and on her happiest occasions, her three grown daughters.
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