Love and Hot Chicken

Love and Hot Chicken

by Mary Liza Hartong
Setting: Tennessee
Genres: Fiction / LGBTQ+ / Lesbian, Fiction / Southern
Length: 8:08
Published on February 20, 2024
Pages: 272
Format: Audiobook Source: Library

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 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 mystery that might be better left unsolved. The Chickie Shak pageant takes off, spurring old rivalries and new friendships in this tale of unexpected connections and new beginnings.

I picked up this book on a whim when I needed a new audiobook and it was available through Libby. Bless its heart, it tried.

It is supposed to be an exploration of grief and a romance. PJ leaves her PhD program when her father dies unexpectedly. She just never goes back though. She gets a job in her hometown at a chicken restaurant as the fry cook and refuses to face her old life. The blurb says that she is staying for her mother but her mother is fine. I didn’t have a lot of patience with this character. She wasn’t dealing with anything. She was just avoiding and whining.

The book was trying very hard to be Southern and Country. It was cute at first and then it got old. PJ’s mom talked in malapropisms all the time. The cutesy rural country sayings and metaphors were not so much sprinkled in as poured over like sausage gravy over some biscuits. It started to get distracting.

Then there is the pageant. The boss of this chain of chicken restaurants declares it mandatory for all his female employees to compete in a beauty pageant. No one sues or even mildly objects? Somehow it is not only televised but people all over the state see it and recognize contestants? This book does not make sense.

It was entertaining as long as you didn’t think too closely about it. I liked the characters. PJ’s best friend Lee Ray was fun. He’s a gay man in a small town who works in a nursing home, leads canoe trips for elderly fisherpeople, and puts on plays like Fiddler on the Piggly Wiggly.

This may have been better read instead of listened to so that it went faster. I might not have noticed all the weird things about the book if I hadn’t spent as much time with it.