"The Waiting Room"

Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room, is followed by We’re all Going to Die. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist. She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Kaminsky applied the Page 69 Test to The Waiting Room and reported the following:

From page 69:

Rain tapped on the window. The baby stared at her with huge eyes, as if he were not quite of this world yet; still in the process of being born, laboring to arrive. With his birth, Dina landed with a jolt onto solid ground. The child demanded of her only food, shelter and love. And the woman she had been vanished that day, as she held Shlomi for the first time. The child seemed to ask questions before he knew words.

This page of The Waiting Room hurls us straight into the mind of the main protagonist, Dina Ronen, an Australian doctor who immigrates to Haifa after meeting her husband, Eitan. Although the birth of their first child brings with it hope, and the promise of a better future, this passage also reflects Dina’s struggle with the tension between love and terror. A reader opening the book on this page will immediately be struck by the delicate balance between light and darkness that the themes in the novel explore. Alice Nelson captures this in her eloquent review of The Waiting Room: “The story weaves between public and private life, between beautifully rendered dailiness and the equally acute claims of the larger narrative of haunted legacies and restless ghosts.”

Visit Leah Kaminsky's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Waiting Room.

Writers Read: Leah Kaminsky.

--Marshal Zeringue