About this Event
Join Tomorrow Bookstore for an author conversation with M.L Rio on her paperback release of Hot Wax.
This event will be held at Tomorrow Bookstore and books will be available to purchase with a ticket ahead of time or at the event. There will be an opportunity to meet the author and get your book signed!
About Hot Wax
The new novel from the bestselling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift—a vivid and immersive tale of one woman’s reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood and made her who she is.
Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father’s forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills’ wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning—one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.
The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father’s sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil’s beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she’d lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country—and drives her to a desperation all her own.
Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back—where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.
“Fans of Rio’s previous work, including the compulsively readable If We Were Villains, will love this twisty story of a woman struggling to reconcile with events from her childhood. Like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six, this work pulsates with the syncopated beats of a music scene that feels ripped from the pages of Rolling Stone. . . . She excavates desperation and despair, layered with acerbic wit and made anthem-like by the rock-and-roll culture shaping it.
VERDICT Rio’s latest feels urgent, painful, and still propulsive and atmospheric, which will cement her status for crafting novels that feel as electric as the music in this story.”
—Emily Bowles, Library Journal
About M.L. Rio:
M.L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains, the USA TODAY bestselling novella Graveyard Shift, and Hot Wax. She never stays in one place for long, but keeps her books, records, and four-legged sidekick in south Philadelphia.
About the Moderator:
Allison Lynn is the author of the novels The Exiles and Now You See It. Her articles, essays, and book reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The New York Times Book Review to People magazine. She teaches in the MFA program at Butler University.
Agenda
🕑: 07:15 PM
Doors Open
🕑: 07:30 PM - 07:35 PM
Event Begins: Introduction
🕑: 07:35 PM - 07:40 PM
Book Reading
🕑: 07:40 PM - 08:15 PM
Moderated Conversation
🕑: 08:15 PM - 08:30 PM
Audience Q&A
🕑: 08:30 PM - 09:00 PM
Meet the Author/ Book Signing
Event venue & nearby stays
Tomorrow Bookstore, 882 Massachusetts Avenue, Indianapolis, United States
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