Monday, July 23, 2012

"This is Not a Test"

Courtney Summers is the author of young adult novels including Fall for Anything, Some Girls Are, and Cracked Up to Be. She lives and writes in Canada, where she divides her time between a piano, a camera, and a word-processing program when she’s not planning for the impending zombie apocalypse.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, This is Not a Test, and reported the following:
This is Not a Test is about six teenagers trapped in their high school during the zombie apocalypse. It's told through the eyes of a girl, Sloane, who was abandoned by her sister in an abusive household. The day the apocalypse happened, Sloane was planning to kill herself. Now she's an accidental survivor, which is a bigger problem to her than the zombies outside, constantly pounding on the doors. I think Page 69 of the book definitely reflects how skewed her perspective and priorities are:
The hall is empty, looks kind of burned out in the dark. My gaze moves from the path back to the auditorium, which I'm not ready to go back to, and the stairwell. I climb the stairs to the second floor. When I reach the top of the landing my body feels impossibly heavy like the weight of the sky is on top of me. I make it halfway down the hall before I'm sitting, resting my head against my knees because Cary knew.

He knew.

This is how I imagined it over and over: it's my eighteenth birthday. I wake up before I have to be awake. My bags are next to the door. Seeing them makes my palms tingle, I'm so nervous/excited/scared/excited/nervous/excited. I hear Lily in the hall and all I can think is how lucky I am, how she's the best sister ever. She stayed two extra years just for me so we could leave at the same time, so I wouldn't have to be alone with him. I wouldn't have to be alone. You'd die without me. She said it all the time. She said it because it was true.
Learn more about the book and author at Courtney Summers' website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Cracked Up to Be.

The Page 69 Test: Some Girls Are.

--Marshal Zeringue