"The Lovers, the Liars, and Me"

DeAndra Davis is New York–born and Florida-bred. She’s a hopeless musical theater nerd (Wicked is definitely her favorite), a perpetual student and teacher, and always trailed by a kid or a dog because she has way too many of both. She has an opinion for everything, an argument ready, and a hug for everyone, and she thinks you should, too. She is the author of All the Noise at Once, winner of the William C. Morris Award for best young adult debut book, and The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Davis applied the Page 69 Test to The Lovers, the Liars, and Me and shared the following:

Page 69 of my book catches Jaliya just as she’s arrived in Jamaica and is video calling her father to check in. Two quotes really sum up the page. The first:

I chew at my lip, suddenly emotional at the sound of his voice. Seeing him makes me feel both better and worse. Have I done the right thing? I left him during my last summer before college to chase a ghost; plus my cousin hates me now.

And the second:

I can’t be totally honest with my dad, not when I’m already lying about why I’m here.

Would I say that this page is the absolute best representation of my book out of all the pages you could flip open to? Probably not. Do I believe it does capture some of the heart of my story very well? Yes!

On this page, we can see Jaliya’s mannerisms that represent her lack of confidence and her anxiety (the lip chewing), we understand how she misses her father, how she’s missing out on time with him to chase a mother that hasn’t proven herself to want Jaliya, how Jaliya’s cousin resents her for her absence over the years, and how she’s built the entire trip to Jamaica on lies and secrecy in order to attempt to find her mom who abandoned her—lying to the most important person in her life: her dad.

That’s a lot to get on one page. We understand, from this page, her hesitation, her regret, her character traits, and even the loss she feels, referring to searching for her mother as looking for a ghost.

So much of The Lovers, the Liars, and Me is about what everyone isn’t saying out loud, what people aren’t admitting, the ways people are searching for love and family wherever they can be. It’s about the characters overcoming themselves and sometimes others. It’s about them finding closure in whatever ways are available, even if it’s not the closure they expected. So, while page 69 may not be the absolute top-notch page to capture that, I still think it’s a darn good one.

Visit DeAndra Davis's website. She can be found on most socials @DeAndraWrites.

My Book, The Movie: The Lovers, the Liars, and Me.

Writers Read: DeAndra Davis.

Q&A with DeAndra Davis.

--Marshal Zeringue