in the Raisa Susanto series; See It End, What Can’t Be Seen, and A Familiar Sight in the Dr. Gretchen White series; and Her Beautiful Life, Her Final Words, Black Rock Bay, Girls of Glass, and It Ends with Her.
Labuskes applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Clean Slate, and shared the following:
From page 69:Visit Brianna Labuskes's website.Anthony Last had grown up in the old building and then volunteered there when he graduated from college. Sometime not long after that, the PTCC nearly shut down for good.My mind was a little blown by how well the Page 69 Test worked. I believed in the secret magic that spawned the fun idea in the first place, but not to this extent.
Then Cutter Sutton, one of Atlanta’s wealthiest businessmen and Anthony’s childhood friend, stepped forward. He’d donated an obscene amount of money that had gotten his name into the official title—even though everyone still called it the PTCC. And while he deserved plenty of credit, it still felt like it had been Anthony Last who had saved the place.
I was thankful to both of them. Even on my mother’s best days, she’d been difficult to live with. She only had those “best days” because all her strict rules and regulations were in place in our house. My mother’s anxiety dictated my wardrobe, my hygiene, my diet. My life.
I did everything I could to kill most of my days at places like the PT-Dub or Leah’s house. Maybe the library, in a pinch, though I hadn’t been a big reader. Still, the ladies there had been nice and hadn’t kicked me out. They seemed to sense I needed a place to escape to. I made a point to volunteer my cleaning services for them at least once a year now.
The PTCC didn’t need that from me—the kids were all given chores so that they would feel a sense of responsibility for the place—but I did pitch in for special events and volunteer days when I could.
The staff loved both Leah and me for that reason, which was why Mrs. Spencer beamed when we stopped by the front desk.
“My girls,” she said. I was pretty sure she’d had thousands of “my girls” over her lifetime behind that counter, but Leah and I told ourselves we were actually special to her.
“Mrs. S, do you remember a girl named Jessie Hayes?” I asked after the requisite small talk.
“Oh, yes.” Mrs. Spencer’s friendly expression darkened into a deep frown. “Poor girl.”
“I’ve heard,” I murmured. “I don’t remember meeting her, though the name rang a distant bell.”
Clean Slate’s mystery revolves around billionaire Cutter Sutton who is linked to the main character Olive Hunt through his childhood friendship with Anthony Last, her father figure. Within two sentences on page 69, the reader is clued in on that complicated dynamic central to the plot. It goes on to explain the connection all three of them have to the Peach Tree Community Center, another central piece of the mystery.
In thinking about her connection to the PTCC, Olive also reveals her background. While it doesn’t explicitly mention that her mother has contamination OCD, it does give enough of a sense of her childhood that the reader can immediately understand she was spending her time avoiding an abusive mother with an anxiety-related disorder.
The page then goes on to make clear just how tight Olive’s relationship with Leah is—a concept that is central to not just this book but the whole series. Leah is Olive’s rock, even when their friendship is tested, and that will come up over and over again through Olive’s journey.
And, finally, the page introduces Jessie Hayes, the victim at the heart of the story. Her decade-old death has reverberated out, affecting so many lives in the current day. The question is, of course, why.
The only way that the test “fails” in terms of giving the readers a full picture of what they’d be signing up for by picking up this book is the fact that Olive is a crime scene cleaner. And even still, she mentions that she volunteers her cleaning services to the library, something that could be extrapolated out to mean she’s a professional at that. This is such a good representation of the mystery and the characters, I’m going to go try it on the rest of my books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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