She applied the Page 69 Test to Lullaby, her debut novel, and reported the following: Is page 69 representative of the rest of Lullaby? Hmmm…Learn more about the book and author at Claire Seeber's website.
Page 69 deals with the first morning after young mum Jess’s baby Louis and husband Mickey have vanished at the Tate Modern Museum in London. It is stifling, a boiling summer morning, and Jess is naturally frantic. It’s the first time she admits her feelings of tension towards DI Silver, the policeman in charge of the case. “Last night, I wondered, why didn’t I warm to you?” Their relationship is pivotal to the novel and the incremental ‘will they won’t they’ nature of it starts here…
Also at this point Jess feels Silver’s finger of suspicion might be pointing at her – “anything to get away from Silver’s polite but probing stare”: a recurring theme of Lullaby: no-one is trustworthy, not even your nearest and dearest…
Crucially we see that Jess is alone, a small boat flailing in the sea of activity around her, though never enough activity to convince her enough is being done to find her son. We also see Jess’s ambivalence towards her sister Leigh, most representative of the confusion Jess feels about her own family. “I was puzzled that my sister was flirting with this stranger in my kitchen”…
At the end of page 69, Jess goes to fetch au pair Maxine for Silver to interview and finds passport photos of the baby hidden in the girl’s empty room…so the page ends on a cliff-hanger, quite typical of the book: lots of new hope and false dawns to keep the reader guessing up to the last minute…
Crucially, dear reader, I really hope that page 69 would want to make you read on!…
Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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