A Complicated Love Song (Letters, Limelight, and Lace)

A captivating and complex beauty, Bettina Charles has exactly what it takes to make it big in the music industry of the 1980s—gorgeous looks, striking intelligence, and undeniable talent as a singer-songwriter, musician, and dancer. As she maneuvers to take the world by storm, her journey is like a metronome—moving back and forth from happy-glad to gloomy-sad. Non-stop drama is the tempo of her complicated love song, causing Tina dizziness during her climb to super-stardom. The rising songstress is no stranger to tragedy, having lost both of her birth parents and her adopted mother at an early age.

Supporting her dream of stellar success is an eclectic family with a flamboyant cousin Carlton and three great-aunties—Gina the sex-crazed guardian, Trudy the religious advisor, and Zooni the dispatcher of evil. There’s also a doting adopted father and cloaked and mysterious maternal grandparents. Cousin Carlton is hilarious, serving as Tina’s best friend, confidant, lead stylist, and personal assistant.

Bettina Charles is mentored by an eccentric musical maestro while being closely guided by her record label. There, she is, helped, haunted, and controlled by the ornery owner of Walden Records—one of the most successful independent music companies in history. His closest advisor and the woman who discovered Tina is the secret-concealing executive vice president and managing directress of the record company.

Despite her love of being on stage and living life through her lyrics, Tina learns that the perils of fame are complicated and unsettling when the music stops. The rising star is forced to confront pesky paparazzi, preposterous propaganda, and private problems presented to the public. Will Tina ever learn the truth hidden from her by the managing directress and will achieving superstardom be enough to soothe her woes? Amid conflicts with conniving and controlling music executives and struggles with loss and loneliness, Bettina Charles inevitably matures to find that nobody is as trustworthy as they once seemed.

Sexy, thought-provoking, and entirely unpredictable, A Complicated Love Song is literary mainstream fiction at its best, documenting one young woman’s rise to pop-icon status between ages seventeen and twenty-one. Peppered with clever turns-of-phrase, lyrics straight from Tina’s songbook, and surprising situations, our first glimpse at Lynda Jones-Burns’s stellar fictional songstress is one that will have readers longing to see what happens next.

A native of Washington, DC, Lynda Jones-Burns was influenced by inner-city realities of boarded-up storefronts, abandoned brownstones, 1970s empowerment movements, and the punk-rock attitude of the 1980s.

She learned and fell in love with the power of the pen at Cardozo Senior High School and honed her craft, concentrating in written communications at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She used her literary talent to own and operate a successful technical publications company for more than twenty years.

From a strong desire to write creatively, Lynda birthed her debut fictional novel, A Complicated Love Song. She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and St. John Baptist Church in Columbia, MD.