"Counting Thyme"

Melanie Conklin is a writer, reader, and life-long lover of books and those who create them. She lives in South Orange, New Jersey with her husband and two small maniacs, who are thankfully booklovers, too. Conklin spent a decade as a product designer and approaches her writing with the same three-dimensional thinking and fastidious attention to detail.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Counting Thyme, her debut middle grade novel, and reported the following:

Counting Thyme is the story of a girl named Thyme, whose family moves across the country for her little brother’s cancer treatment. On page 69 [inset; click to enlarge], Thyme is coming home to their apartment in New York City after Val’s first day of treatment. It’s an apprehensive moment because Thyme’s parents haven’t been very forthcoming about what will actually happen to Val. Thyme has looked up lots of information on her own, because that’s the kind of eleven-year-old girl she is…but there is so much fear bottled up inside of her: fear of the side effects of Val’s treatment (which can be intensely painful), fear of what this process is doing to her mother, fear of the unknown future. In many ways, Thyme tries to put off this future by clinging to her past. She wants to go back home. She’s focused on that goal, and is spending a lot of her time on a plan to escape. But in this scene, you see her choose. Even though she’s scared, she opens the door.

Visit Melanie Conklin's website, Twitter perch, and watch the Counting Thyme book trailer.

--Marshal Zeringue