Time to show you Wreck Your Heart’s pretty face! Chicago Review of Books is hosting a cover reveal for us today, along with a little behind-the-scenes about the design and illustration. Minotaur Books hired an illustrator from Anderson Design Group, the artists behind a postcard I bought when I was in Nashville last year—I already loved their work, and now you will, too.

Go meet Dahlia Devine!

Here’s a little taste of Wreck Your Heart, to celebrate.

When the guy across the aisle on the crowded 56 bus gave me a wary look, I realized I’d been singing.

It happened, okay? Sometimes I caught myself acting out earnest Grammy Award acceptance speeches, too.

But I was hugging a bulging thirty-three-gallon garbage bag and I could suddenly see what I looked like hunched in my window seat, clutching my oversized go bag and dancing like no one was watching, as the country song goes. Except they were. Watching. Just trying not to, obviously. The other passengers on the bus were huddled into their own body heat, studying their phones, napping, surfing the bus’s movements, their heads bobbing as the bus hit another pothole. They all had Christmas shopping bags in their laps and the proper, calculated disregard of their fellow man that public transportation demanded.

“What’s your deal?” The guy had leaned toward me, smiling a little. He pulled the Bluetooth earmuff off his ear.

“My deal?”

He was going to have to be far more specific.

“You in a play or something?” he asked. “Your . . . costume?”

The guy didn’t know how close to the surface my every emotion was. “I beg your Parton?”

“Dolly Parton,” the guy agreed, pleased with himself. He gestured a gloved hand, but generally, as though he didn’t know where to start pointing. With my hair, already backcombed and pinned into victory rolls for the show tonight, or my fringed-arm black leather jacket, much too thin and short for a white-cold Chicago winter day. At my silver toe-capped queen of the rodeo boots, probably, better onstage than on icy sidewalks. Or if he was one for details, maybe he’d picked out the faded picnic-basket gingham of my shirt showing at the collar of the sweater I had to borrow from Alex.

It’s complicated. I’ll tell you who Alex is later.

My deal was none of this guy’s business, but okay, here we go: I’d had bad roommates before and villainous boyfriends for sure—but until now, never at the same time, in the same person. Never had a guy take off, oh, hey, with the rent money—and now here’s your girl, dead of winter in Chicago, evicted the week before Christmas and, trying to get that sorted, missing a shift at the music shop, strike three, and now unemployed, too.

My deal, and you are welcome to it.

—

I hope you want to learn more about Doll Devine’s DEAL.

Pre-orders are OPEN everywhere you book books, but I hope you will ask your local independent bookstore for a copy. If you want a signed and PERSONALIZED copy, you can order from one of *my* independent bookstores in Chicago. From The Book Cellar or New Book Joy—women-owned Chicago stores!