Love and Hot Chicken
A Delicious Southern Novel
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
"Delightful! This novel will open your heart and preach to your funny bone."—Jill Conner Browne, New York Times bestselling author of the Sweet Potato Queen's Book of Love
The debut of a dynamite new voice from the South, Love and Hot Chicken is a spicy and hilarious southern rom-com about family, friendship, fried chicken, and two girls in love.
The Chickie Shak is something of a historical landmark. Red clapboard walls, thriving wasp population, yard-toilets resplendent with sunflowers. My best friend Lee Ray and I used to come after our softball games and snag a picnic table while our mammas ordered the home team special. Truth is, most people around here order the same thing until the day somebody throws their ashes off a roller coaster at Dollywood. The line snakes around the building as far as you can see, the grimiest bunch of Jessies, Pearls, and Scooters you ever did behold, hobnobbing in the parking lot from noon until night.
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? Mamma’s broken heart, that’s why. But truth be told, PJ’s own heart ain’t 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. It may not be glamorous, but it’s something to do.
Fate, and a healthy dose of Southern humor, shakes up PJ’s life again when 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, and learns to fear her smack-talking manager, Linda.
As PJ and Boof fall for each other, Boof’s search for her birth mother—a Pennywhistle native—catapults the budding couple into a heartwarming mystery that might be better left unsolved. The Chickie Shak pageant takes off, spurring old rivalries and new friendships in this tale of found family, unexpected connections and new beginnings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hartong's snark-filled debut mixes a laugh-out-loud lampooning of small-town Southern life with a coming-of-age queer romance. It's earthy, irreverent, and a hint mean-spirited, and the plot, while not quite an afterthought, is a lightly sketched bundle of implausibilities: PJ Spoon, 26, returns home to Pennywhistle, Tenn., to support her newly widowed mother after her father's sudden death, abandoning her doctoral studies and an out-and-proud social life in the far more liberal Nashville. She distracts herself from grief with a job cooking at a chain eatery, the Chickie Shak, which has only two other employees: a redhead who calls herself Boof and has "a disposition so sunny it calls for SPF," and an older woman named Linda who "can be a little testy," PJ muses, "but I reckon most Lindas are. Every now and then she'll call somebody sweetheart in a way that makes you want to piss yourself and die." Chemistry instantly sizzles between PJ and Boof, but a shadow looms over their budding romance: mandatory participation in the franchise's first ever beauty pageant. The absurd competition for the Chickie Shak Hot Chicken Crown exasperates PJ and Boof, animates Linda (who joyfully experiments with rhinestones), and fosters resentments that forestall conversations all three need to have if they're going to grow beyond their Chickie Shak lives. The emotional beats are somewhat sporadic, but the one-liners are relentless. Hartong's genuine comedic gift makes PJ's story well placed to become a beach-read hit.
