If you had to assign the music business to a literary category, you’d have lots of options: Horror, true crime, maybe science fiction. But none of those possibilities has the storytelling potential of a good romance. Enter Rock Crush And Roll, an amorous potboiler from author Hunter Snow that shows what happens behind the scenes can be even spicier than what goes on in the lyrics.
The plot in a nutshell: A female artist manager named Tyler Robertson works at a company that represents the biggest rock star in the world, Cary Kingston. But when their relationship becomes more than professional, she has a lot of soul-searching to do. For one thing, she’s violating her hard-earned policy against dating musicians. (Ever been in or around a band? Good call!) And his lifestyle is hardly conducive to having a serious relationship. Now she must navigate a precarious courtship while trying to figure out if her attraction is really to him, or merely to what he represents.
“This book, at its core, is about navigating relationships,” says Snow. “Friends, families, partners, colleagues, and what truly makes you happy at the end of the day.”
The musical milieu of the story was a natural for Snow, a resident of the Pacific Northwest who once held an unspecified job in the business. “I had to be careful not to base the characters on specific people in the music industry,” she says, “but you might recognize some of them — or think you do.” And if that weren’t a guessing game enough, she’s sprinkled her narrative with more than 300 bits of music trivia and related references. Can you spot them all before Tyler and Cary find genuine domestic bliss … or rip each other’s hearts to shreds like off-brand Kleenex?
Not just a steamy page-turner, the novel has its light-hearted elements as well. “My copy editor spit out his coffee while reading one part of the book because he was laughing so hard,” Snow says. “That made my day.” Yet there’s a serious agenda at work here too. “As a single woman, I wanted to write about positive relationships with men. Yes, some men are terrible to women and some women are terrible to men. But it was important to me that the main character in this book had a good relationship with her dad.”
Written in six weeks and edited over the course of a year, the novel is now available as a 332-page paperback or Kindle download. And it isn’t the last word on the subject from Snow — at least not exactly: “I don’t have any plans to write a sequel,” she says. “However, my next book is also a rock ’n’ roll romance with an entirely different trope.”
Get more information at the Hunter Snow books website.
