Love and Hot Chicken is a book about finding connections in the unlikeliest of places, about finding love when and where you least expect it. It’s a heartwarming little book, with a cosy feel to it all.

The story follows PJ, who, following the death of her father, finds herself giving up on her post-graduate degree and coming home to work as a fry cook at Chickie Shak. Here she meets Boof, who’s searching for her birth mother, and Linda, the less-than-friendly manager of the place. Then, just as PJ is settling herself, comes the CEO’s big idea: a Hot Chicken Pageant, where Chickie Shak workers the country over will compete to win a prize.

The book, at times, feels very much larger-than-life (much like the Chickie Shak CEO), but in a way that feels like it’s bursting with love, if that makes sense. It’s not just love between the characters, but also love for the region in which the book is set. Love even for Chickie Shak, with its questionable sounding hygiene rating. This is a story about community, and about healing: PJ from the loss of her father, and Boof when it comes to her mother.

So if you’re looking for a read that will warm the cockles of your soul, Love and Hot Chicken fits the remit entirely.

This was ridiculous in the best way possible. There’s a beauty pageant of workers at Chickie Shak, a historical landmark that serves Nashville Hot chicken, where the contestants are called Hot Chickens, there’s a local author who writes book about “The Raccoon King,” and there’s a sweet love story where one of the characters names is Boof, I kid you not.

PJ Spoon, who is a student at Vanderbilt, returns to her small town of Pennywhistle, Tennessee after the death of her father. She’s not sure what she wants to do and if she wants to return to school, and she starts working at the Chickie Shak. There she meets singer songwriter Boof, who is searching for her mother, a Pennywhistle native.

This was fun, charming, silly, and sweet! And it was really well done. If you’re looking for some Southern charm check out this debut novel!

2.5⭐️ - If you’re looking for a light, easy read, this is for you. I appreciated the family dynamics, the small-town charm and the sweet romance that came out. As a debut novel, the book is well written. However, it wasn’t my cup of tea - the story takes a little while to get into, and is a little predictable at times.

Thank you NetGalley and William Morrow publishing for sending an ARC of this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

An enjoyable read once you get into it. But it took awhile for it to hook me. A major point in the story is very predictable and I was able to figure it out before the first hint was dropped. I very much appreciate the fade to black over explicit sex scenes. If that’s what you are after this book isn’t for you.

I really wanted to adore this book but sadly I felt like it was only okay. The plot was great and the characters were so much fun. My problem was really the dialog. The constant southern phrases was very distracting. It made the book feel cheap and like the author was trying to hard to lean on the southern thing. A book can be southern without being SOUTHERN and the author seemed to lose that.
If that sort of thing doesn't bother you you'll probably love this cause this is a really good story. I just don't think it was for me.

What a delightful debut! A sweet, fun, heartfelt queer romance set in the heart of the south. I loved the voice here and Hartzog is an author I will enthusiastically support in the future!

I didn't love the over-the-top Southern-ness of this one, but I deeply appreciate the sapphic content and queer-centered, almost queer-normative world here. (Full disclosure, I went to Vanderbilt for grad school and grew up in small towns in Texas, so I know a bit from Southern, but...some of the accents and slang felt pandering to me. But I decidedly did not grow up in small town Tennessee, so I could be dead wrong about this.)

Grief, a sprinkling of Sapphic romance, a silly pageant, and a whole lot of introspection wrapped up in Southern small town comfort make this the best recipe for hot chicken.

After PJ's daddy dies, she heads back to her small hometown of Pennywhistle to deal with her grief and work at the Chickie Shak. After the Chickie Shak owner announces the mandatory Hot Chicken Pageant, PJ allows herself to fall for her co-worker Boof, who came to town searching for her birth mother.

Just like PJ, I lost my daddy a few months ago, and her story was super relatable. I loved how homophobia wasn't even a thing and how every single character had their own life going on. You really get the vibe of a Southern small town while dealing with some big topics like grief, abandonment, and not feeling good enough. This is such an incredible debut, and I can't wait to see what else this author writes.

Love and Hot Chicken is a funny novel full of colorful descriptions of the lives of three women who work at The Chickie Shak in Pennywhistle, TN. PJ abandons her final research for her PH.D. from Vanderbilt when she returns to town for her father's funeral; Boof, a Nashville singer and songwriter, arrives in Pennywhistle looking for her birth mother; and Linda has lived her life in Pennywhistle and rules the cash register at the chicken restaurant. While the story is a great read, the descriptions could benefit from some white space to give the reader's eyes room to pause. Nonetheless, Love and Hot Chicken is highly recommended for readers who want to see Tennessee outside its King James Bible and Southern Baptist history and become absorbed in all the big hair of women who live in Tennessee. Great novel.

Based purely on the title, I had expected Mary Liza Hartong’s Love and Hot Chicken to be…well, just that. A romance novel set at a hot chicken establishment in Tennessee. And while I wasn’t completely off, this charming debut novel wound up taking me completely by surprise and delivering something far beyond what I had expected.

PhD student PJ Spoon returns to her small town of Pennywhistle for her father’s funeral, and mired in her own grief, takes a job as a fry cook at the local chicken shop. There, she develops a crush on their waitress and fellow now employee, Boof, who’s come to town looking to solve a family mystery. The crush is mutual, but it takes PJ a while to open up, still grieving and stuck with years of regret and new perspectives only just now surfacing.

While the budding relationship between PJ and Boof is certainly a very important angle to the story, Love and Hot Chicken isn’t a romance novel per se. Rather, it’s a quiet - yet very funny - meditation on life, and how those around us shape who we are, and how time, and distance can offer an new and sometimes uncomfortable perspective on our pasts and presents.

For a debut novel, Hartong starts off very strong, speaking so authentically I could practically hear the twang leaping off the page. PJ’s narration is so seamless, so lyrical, so full of metaphors that make perfect sense but that I would never think to come up with myself. It’s the type of unique authorial voice that a writer hoping to merely “sound” Southern could never hope to replicate. Not that I’m any great expert on the American South (though I have been to Tennesee, to Dollywood, and actually driven through Pigeon Forge), but I don’t think you have to be to appreciate this book.

With Love and Hot Chicken, Hartong has written a charming, small town queer romance full of heart, heartbreak, beautiful prose, and a memorable ensemble, and I look forward to seeing what else this author comes up with.

Love and Hot Chicken hits shelves on February 20, 2024. Special thank you to William Morrow for the advance copy for review purposes.

I had fun reading this book. I liked the characters, the setting was really cute, and the romance was fun. I think it was missing some depth, but sometimes you do need a light-hearted book that you can just read and enjoy the whole way through, and this did that.

A fun Southern based novel that takes place in the local favorite, Chicken Shak. Wonderful characterizations and a delightful plot. This one is not to be missed when you want to read so.ething to put a smile on your lips and a hankering for some good fried chicken!

As a lesbian from rural Appalachia, I really, really wanted to love this book, but I found the Southern cliches so heavy-handed and over-the-top I had a hard time getting through it. It was almost like it was inviting people to laugh AT us Southerners, not WITH us Southerners. The sapphic love story is super sweet and I bet I would have loved the heck out of it when I was younger, but I just found the stereotypes a bit too much to allow me to enjoy this one fully.

Thank you to William Morrow and NetGalley to read this novel and provide and honest review.

I wanted to like “Love and Hot Chicken” more than I did. It had a great premise and a wonderfully colorful character voice in the protagonist, PJ Spoon. But I tend to dislike slice-of-life no-angst summer stories so this really wasn’t the book for me.

I actually liked that it was a story more about friendship, grief, family and nostalgia more than a queer love story. When her father dies, PJ goes back home from her history Ph.D program in Nashville to grieve, finding work at a fried chicken shack and helping her mama (who seems to not actually need any help). She reunites with her gay best friend, Lee Ray. She gets a crush on the server at the chicken shack, a woman named Boof who is determined to crack open PJ’s walls. Along the way they are enlisted in a beauty pageant for employees of the chain of chicken shacks that shakes up life in the small town where they live.

There just wasn’t any conflict, and what little there is gets quickly resolved. PJ plays hard to get with Boof until she doesn’t; they have a carefree, surface-level romance but don’t trust each other enough with deeper secrets. PJ doesn’t even tell Boof that she’s ditched her Ph.D program. I get that PJ’s trying to open up more and that’s her struggle throughout the book, but it made for a character I found difficult to root for. There’s no homophobia in this world, just complete acceptance and love for who you are, aside from Boof’s fraught search for her birth mom.

I got so bored that I skimmed the last half because I just stopped caring about the characters or story. It would have worked better as a short story.

If you do like your romances easy friendship-to-marriage-talk, charming descriptions of small town life and Southern food heritage, and you don’t need anything deeper than cotton candy, you’ll still find plenty to like here. The prose was good, the story just… meh.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance review copy. I’m leaving this review voluntarily.