"Michael Without Apology"

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of more than fifty published and forthcoming books.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Michael Without Apology, and reported the following:

As it turns out, page 69 of Michael is the end of a chapter, and a short page. Here’s the text:

He brought the letter to school with him, where he stood in front of his locker and tore it into pieces the size of confetti. He never opened it. He ripped it up still sealed, envelope and all.

Then he carried the pieces, clutched tightly in his fist, into the boys’ room, where he flushed them down the toilet.

They didn’t go down properly. They caused a clog, and the toilet overflowed.

And Michael thought, That figures.

It was like a sign to him that the envelope and its dreaded contents had been nothing but trouble. Like something that rises up from hell and still has a little of the evil in it.

He moved out of the stall quickly before any of the toilet water could get on his shoes, and left the whole mess behind him.

Here’s what I do like about this page 69 test: These actions are a pretty visual and visceral sign of an upset child, and I think it would tend to make the reader curious as to what was in that letter and who sent it to him. So it might be good in terms of making the reader want to read more.

Here’s what I don’t like about it: Most of the novel is set in the present, when Michael is 19, and following him into his early 20s. There are just a few chapters that go back to his childhood, to help the reader understand how he ended up scarred on so many different levels, including the literal scarring. But this just happened to be one of the latter. This page is about the wound, and the book is about the healing. It’s about unapologetically presenting yourself to the world as you are, dropping all the shame and judgment around body image and appearance. And that aspect feels much more important to me than how he ended up scarred in the first place.

So… on balance, I’m going to say that this page 69 does not test especially well, as my books go.

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Q&A with Catherine Ryan Hyde.

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--Marshal Zeringue