The Page 69 Test: "The Brothers Kenney"

Thursday, August 22, 2024

"The Brothers Kenney"

Adam Mitzner is the acclaimed Amazon Charts bestselling author of Dead Certain, Never Goodbye, and The Best Friend in the Broden Legal series as well as the

stand-alone thrillers A Matter of Will, A Conflict of Interest, A Case of Redemption, Losing Faith, The Girl from Home, The Perfect Marriage, and Love Betrayal Murder. A practicing attorney in a Manhattan law firm, he and his family live in New York City.

Mitzner applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Brothers Kenney, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Brothers Kenney is ironically the first page I wrote. When I initially considered writing about a former track star brought low, the idea came to me in the form of envisioning a race.

Sean Kenney, the protagonist of The Brothers Kenney, was once a world-class 1,500-meter man. Page 69 finds him running in the NCAA championships. More specifically, he’s entering the bell lap, the point in a race when a runner must disregard the burning in his lungs and the pain in his legs and the will to win takes over.

Another important part of my pre-writing conception of the book was the mantra of Sean’s coach. Inspired by Coach Taylor in Friday Night Lights (“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose”) Sean refers to it as Coach Pal’s prayer: Leg’s fast; mind faster; heart unstoppable.

There are several races in the book, told as flashbacks, which provide the framework for the story. Each showcases what Sean Kenney was once capable of and begs the question whether, even though his running days are long past, he can again find that best part of himself and thereby obtain redemption for his past failures.

In that way, page 69 is a snapshot of what the book is about – showing Sean at the height of his powers and raising the specter of whether he can rise to the challenges he now confronts as he did those back in his glory days.