"Midair"

Kodi Scheer teaches writing at the University of Michigan, where she earned her MFA. She was awarded the Dzanc Prize for Excellence in Literary Fiction and Community Service. As a fellow of the Sozopol Fiction Seminars, she traveled to Bulgaria to engage with an international community of writers, translators, and readers. Her stories have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, The Florida Review, Quarterly West, and Bellevue Literary Review.

Scheer applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Midair, and reported the following:

First of all, a couple of the characters in Midair would giggle at "69." The four girls are coming-of-age (no pun intended) in the late '90s, before porn was as widely available. There was no such thing as sexting, and at the time, Playboy seemed risque. So in some ways, the girls are more naive than teens today. By current standards, they seem a lot younger than 17 or 18.

To address the question of the "test," page 69 does highlight one of the major themes of the novel--expectation vs. reality--when Kat says, "There's no crying in Paris!" They're all disappointed by their first experiences in the city but they're hesitant to admit this. The page also introduces an important component of the plot: the truth portion of Truth or Dare. The game eventually proves harmful, and in the end, fatal.

Visit Kodi Scheer's website.

My Book, The Movie: Midair by Kodi Scheer.

Writers Read: Kodi Scheer.

--Marshal Zeringue