"HEAR"

Robin Epstein is a writer, runner, professor and astronaut* (*in her own mind). Beginning her career as a comic and television writer, Epstein was lucky enough to become head writer and on-air sidekick for a teen girl game show called Clued In, where she was known as "Guru Robin," an embarrassing nickname she's unable to shake. Her young adult novel, God Is In the Pancakes, was an official selection of the 2012 New York State Reading Association (NYSRA) Charlotte Award Master List. She's written for the New York Times, Marie Claire, Glamour, as well as other publications. A contributor to This American Life on NPR, she also writes video games and books for TV shows on the Disney Channel. Epstein attended Princeton University, got her MFA from Columbia University, and teaches at NYU.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, HEAR, and reported the following:

I think page 69 is a perfect micro-read of HEAR. It starts with Brian Black, a distinguished professor of engineering and the great uncle of our heroine, Kass, telling his young charges: “Einstein got it wrong. Even geniuses get things wrong. Remember that.”

Brian explains that Einstein believed the universe was deterministic and that things don’t happen randomly or in ways that can’t be explained. But most physicists, and eventually Einstein himself, came to accept Niels Bohr’s theories that there is, in fact, plenty of mystery to our universe.

Since HEAR is a novel in which the characters grapple with extrasensory perception, a subject that many people refuse to believe as real, I’d like to think that page 69 is a reminder and a wake-up call. Just because we don’t believe or understand something doesn’t mean it can’t exist.

Visit Robin Epstein's website.

--Marshal Zeringue