She then returned to school to earn her Masters of Fine Arts in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and has been writing ever since.
Friedland’s books have been awarded the 2020 and 2021 gold medals in fiction from Readers’ Favorite. Her novels have also been named the 2021 Kirkus Reviews Best Indie Book of the Year, the SheReads Best Book Club Pick of 2021, and the Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star finalist for 2022. She regularly reviews fiction for trade publications and appears at schools and other locations as a guest lecturer.
Friedland lives in Westchester, New York with her husband, four children, and two dogs.
She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Breathing Under Water, and shared the following::
On page 69 of Breathing Under Water, one of the main characters, Berry, is just getting home from work. She works as an assistant principal at a fancy prep school, and she's vying for promotion. One of her challenges is that her sixteen-year-old son, Leo, is on the spectrum, and she's worried that she doesn't have time to take on a more demanding role at work. As she gets home on page 69, she's thinking about Leo's older brother Harrison and how the family is always asking Harrison to pinch hit and help with Leo one way or another. Berry doesn't want to keep putting so many requests on her older son. But taking on the new position might require Berry to rely more on her other family members for help with Leo. The remainder of the page is about Berry's internal conflict over whether she could handle the job of principal and how badly she wants it.Visit Jacqueline Friedland's website.
Do we find out the main themes of the story from looking at page 69?
If this book were entirely about Berry, the answer would be yes. She is a mother who has struggled with the question of how to best raise each of her very different sons. She has a job she loves, but juggling it with her complicated home life has always been tough. You see all of that on page 69. However, the book has another main character, McKenna, who narrates several of the chapters. She's a college athlete with many challenges of her own. During the story, she gets framed for something she didn't do, and she's at risk of losing everything. McKenna's chapters are very focused on the unreasonable demands on college athletes, friendship, and ambition. What connects Berry and McKenna is Leo. I would say you get the gist of about fifty percent of the relevant story by looking at page 69.
Writers Read: Jacqueline Friedland.
--Marshal Zeringue
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