"The Outcasts"

Kathleen Kent is the author of The Heretic's Daughter and The Traitor's Wife.

Kent applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Outcasts, and reported the following:

Lucinda Carter, one of the main characters of The Outcasts, is fleeing a life of prostitution and posing as a school teacher in a rough-edged settlement on the Gulf Coast of Texas called Middle Bayou. On page 69 she is being interviewed by her prospective employer, a down on his luck, ex-plantation owner named Euphrastus Waller. Lucinda is an intelligent, resourceful woman but has a hard time maintaining her composure when handed a teaching volume entitled The American Speaker (an authentic manual of the 1870’s) with entries such as “Religion Never to be Treated with Levity” and “The Folly of Mispending Time.”

She is then taken to see her new school house for the first time, escorted by Euphrastus who stares openly at her naked fingers---unlike his accompanying wife and daughter who are both wearing gloves---and Lucinda asks him about his past as a wealthy planter.

“‘I had twelve hundred acres of cotton and tobacco in Mississippi.” (Says Euphrastus)

“Before the war.’ He stared off down the road, his eyes fixed and tormented...”

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Kent's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Outcasts.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last First Day"

Carrie Brown and her husband, the novelist John Gregory Brown, have spent their working lives writing and teaching side by side in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains at Sweet Briar College, where John Gregory Brown directs the College’s creative writing program.

They have published ten books between them and raised three children on the campus at Sweet Briar. Over the years, they have been fortunate to host many of the world’s great writers at their home, Sanctuary Cottage, and to introduce those writers and their work to hundreds of students.

Brown now serves as Distinguished Visiting Professor at nearby Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, where she lives at the University and works with undergraduate and graduate students in the University’s esteemed creative writing program. She and her husband travel between the two literary landscapes and enjoy the best of both worlds.

Brown applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Last First Day, and reported the following:

Time is important in the novel. Its title -- The Last First Day, a phase that sort of folds in on itself; you have to stop and think -- reflects the way that time and memory operate, which, as we all know, is not linear. Page 69, as it happens, is one of the many non-linear moments by which the story progresses. We call such moments “flashbacks,” of course, for the way they collapse time in a flash, but in the case of this novel, the forward and back in time are so interwoven, that flashback doesn’t seem the right word. The flashes here are like distant lightning pulsing all night long on the dark horizon. The past is always with these characters.

The Last First Day is the story of a marriage, told primarily from the point of view of the wife, Ruth. Her husband, Peter, becomes the beloved headmaster of a boys’ boarding school in Maine in the early 1960s, and he remains at his post for nearly fifty years, with Ruth by his side. The couple meet as children, and they remain together, except for one nearly tragic separation, for the rest of their lives.

The novel is divided into two parts, “The Last Day” and “The First Day.” I was reading a lot of novellas while working on the book, and it was my intention that the parts could stand alone. Every school year has its first day, of course, and the first part of the novel –“The Last Day” -- begins and ends with what will turn out to be the last first day of the school year for Ruth and Peter. The second part of the novel – “The First Day” – also ends where it began (though a little less directly), which is the scene of the couple’s first meeting. The inversion here – that we begin with the end – is purposeful. The novel is a retrospective, and I hope it contains the pleasures of a retrospective, which is that we see the ending in the beginning and vice versa.

Ruth’s experience – her love for Peter, her struggle to define herself as separate from her husband, in an era when women were often expected to put aside their own lives for the sake of their husband’s career -- is the current that flows through the novel. It is not a current that obeys any law of gravity or follows the usual behavior of waterways, however, which is to head in one direction toward the sea. The novel moves forward and back in time, circling certain moments, eddying in pools, contemplating the riverbank, retrieving and rethinking and remembering. In the course of this journey, the reader learns about Ruth and Peter’s lives and comes to see the ways in which their lives and their marriage – like any life or any marriage – contain happiness and sadness, tedium and passion, spans of tranquility, winters of discontent, brinks of disaster. Ruth comes to see and understand her life both accurately and inaccurately, as we all do. Her love for Peter, however, and his for her – is the landmark on the horizon by which Ruth keeps righting herself. Sometimes she is lost, but it is in her love for Peter – a generous and deep love -- that she most fully finds herself.

I hope the novel delivers what I think Virginia Woolf once said she wanted to convey with a story or a sentence: the felt experience of another human being …without impediment. I am a great admirer of Woolf, especially Mrs. Dalloway, with its breathtaking luxuriance of time (oddly, the more time there is, and the less rush, the more suspense is created). In general, the more complex the ways in which a novel moves through time – think Proust, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Alice Munro, for instance -- the happier I am. I have an affinity as a reader and a writer for stories and novels that balance the world on the head of a pin, as it were.

On page 69 of the novel, Ruth and Peter are at a doctor’s office, receiving a diagnosis for Peter that is not fatal, though it is serious. It is a moment of complicated time – Ruth is recalling this moment just as the first day of the school year, which has been punctuated with vague warnings and stirrings of unease, comes to a close. In Ruth and Peter’s conversation with the doctor, we see Ruth’s terror at the prospect of losing Peter, her guilt that she has been insufficiently attentive to symptoms that she now learns are real, and also a tiny portrait of Peter: when he “obediently” puts on the big folding cardboard sunglasses given to him by the doctor, he looks “ridiculous.” This is a moment of dismay for Ruth, as she sees this deeply respected man whom she loves so much appear vulnerable. It is also a little reminder of the intimacy of marriage, where one is likely to appear ridiculous or vulnerable at least some of the time.

That a little moment of terror and sadness reappears for Ruth as the sun begins to set on this momentous last first day (though she does not know it will be the last) is part of the novel’s strategy of sounding various notes all at once, like bells of both warning and celebration being rung all over town.

Why is time the underlying theme of the novel, you might ask? Well, the older I get, the more aware of it I become. It might be that simple. I think it was the writer Ron Carlson who said that stories are the ways that writers stage dress rehearsals for events that worry them. In a story, one can boss things around so that one feels less helpless. Perhaps I was, with one eye closed, looking ahead from the vantage of my own long marriage at my husband’s and my inevitable and final parting.

Page 69:

Ruth had felt stricken. She had thought Peter was getting taller somehow, but it seemed so unlikely. He’d lost some weight, and she’d attributed the odd effect of his apparently increased height to that change in his appearance. But he’d complained about his shoes, and just the week before she’d replaced both his ancient wingtips and a pair of sneakers.

The syndrome, it turned out, was a form of giantism. Marfan syndrome, the doctor had continued, an uncommon genetic disease, an inherited defect of connective tissue. It was relatively rare, though less so than one might think, he said.

I’ve never seen it before, actually, he admitted, but there was no reason for them to worry about it much in a man of Peter’s age.

Others things, he implied, unsmiling, would probably finish off Peter first.

Peter had taken the news with what Ruth considered freakish calm.

In truth, though, there was little to be done. He had regular echocardiograms, as there could be trouble with deterioration of the walls of the aorta, an enlargement of the heart. (How terrible and ironic, Ruth had thought, if Peter should die because his heart was too big.) But so far he’d been fine. Other than new prescriptions for his glasses – at least every year and sometimes more often -- there hadn’t been anything else in terms of treatment, they’d been told.

The doctor had put more drops in Peter’s eyes that day and sent him off with a pair of folding cardboard sunglasses, which he obediently had put on. They were much too large, even for his big head, and he had looked ridiculous.

Learn more about the book and author at Carrie Brown's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Last First Day.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Equilibrium"

Lorrie Thomson lives in New Hampshire with her husband and their children. When she’s not reading, writing, or hunting for collectibles, her family lets her tag along for camping adventures, daylong paddles, and hikes up 4,000 footers.

Though her new book Equilibrium is fiction, Thomson had the very real experience of coping with mental illness in her own family when her oldest son was diagnosed with schizophrenia while she was writing the book. For support and education regarding mental illness, she recommends that readers visit NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Thomson applied the Page 69 Test to Equilibrium and reported the following:

Equilibrium is told from the alternating points of view of young widow Laura Klein and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Darcy.

Laura has spent all of her adult life caring for her bipolar husband and putting herself second—emotionally, creatively, and intellectually. She’s recently rented out her late husband’s writing studio to ER resident Aidan Walsh. On page 69, Laura’s insomnia has led her to mixing cookie dough, writing for the first time in years, and knocking on the door of her new tenant. She’s on the verge of reaching for all she deserves:

Her bed-sock feet relaxed against the smooth wood floor, responding to a palpable softness in the air. Yet, the distance between her and Aidan contained an energy that shifted her balance forward. A corresponding internal tug spun her thoughts. “Goodness, no. I was cooking. In the kitchen.”

He raised his eyebrows into identical arcs.

“I was getting some dough ready. For gingersnaps. I haven’t really baked anything.”

He nodded, as if her nonsensical speech made all the sense in the world.

“You have to let the dough kind of meld together. So I was writing.” She didn’t wait for his reaction; she just barreled forward. “Not really writing. Sketching out the framework for a character that came to mind while I was baking, but not really baking. You have to let character sketches meld, too.”

“Sure.” He took a step in her direction.

“Loved the music. I don’t think I’ve heard it before though. I was wondering if you could tell me what it’s called.”

“Nope.”

“Not even a clue?” She tried looking him in the eye, even though his bare chest was vying for her attention. Just a sprinkle of dark hair at the center. And that waist—she gazed over his shoulder.

“I’ve never heard it before, either. Never played it before tonight.”

“You write music?”

“Occasionally. When I can’t sleep.”

Her new friend, Doctor Aidan Walsh, wrote music and strummed the guitar like a virtuoso.

Well, she couldn’t look past him when he was standing so close. “The music was beautiful.” He was beautiful. “You should write it down.” She should stop offering unbidden advice.

Learn more about the book and author at Lorrie Thomson's website, Twitter perch and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Lorrie Thomson.

--Marshal Zeringue

"In Falling Snow"

Mary-Rose MacColl's first novel, No Safe Place, was a runner-up for the Australian Vogel literary award. Her first non-fiction book, The Birth Wars, was a finalist for the Walkley Awards. She lives in Brisbane, Australia, and Banff, Canada, with her husband and young son.

MacColl applied the Page 69 Test to In Falling Snow, her North American debut, and reported the following:

On page 69, we are in the 1970s story where Iris Crane, now in her eighties, has just been invited back to Royaumont, a hospital in World War I where Iris worked as a nurse. Iris had gone to France from Australia because her 15-year-old brother Tom had run off to war, and she was to bring him home. At this stage, all we know is that something happened there and it’s haunted Iris. In the pages before, Iris has been arguing with her grand-daughter Grace, who she raised, about whether she’s well enough to make the trip, and Grace has just left her to go to work. Seeing the invitation takes Iris back, to what happened at Royaumont.

After I got off the phone, I realised I was still holding the invitation in my hand. Water under the bridge, I’d told Violet. What a stupid thing to say.

And then we’re back in 1914, Iris at 21 and her friend Violet Heron, 25, the ‘flower bird’ girls as they come to be known, driving back from the little railway station in Viarmes to Royaumont, to unload straw mattresses for the 16 doctors, nurses and orderlies to sleep on that first night. The party had arrived at the rundown abbey a few days before, but there’s no electricity, no heating and rubbish everywhere. In less than two weeks, they need to establish a hospital.

We worked with three orderlies to unload the mattresses from the truck and carry them up the two flights of stairs to the room in which we would all sleep. Miss Ivens had offered any who wanted their own rooms but everyone felt there was safety in numbers. Who knew what ghosts lurked in the dark corners of an old abbey?

From here, the Royaumont story takes off. Iris, a nurse, becomes Miss Ivens’s assistant. Violet, her dear friend, drives an ambulance. Iris almost forgets about Tom, a decision she hardly knows she makes which will haunt her for the rest of her life.

Learn more about the book and author at Mary-Rose MacColl's website, and follow MacColl on Facebook and Twitter.

My Book, The Movie: In Falling Snow.

Writers Read: Mary-Rose MacColl.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Seven for a Secret"

Lyndsay Faye is the author of critically acclaimed Dust and Shadow, and is featured in Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Faye, a true New Yorker in the sense that she was born elsewhere, lives in Manhattan with her husband.

Faye's love of her adopted city led her to research the origins of the New York City Police Department, the inception of which exactly coincided with the start of the Irish Potato Famine. Her second and third novels, The Gods of Gotham and its sequel Seven for a Secret, follow ex-bartender Timothy Wilde as he navigates the rapids of his violently turbulent city, his no less chaotic elder brother Valentine Wilde, and the perils of learning police work in a riotous and racially divided political landscape.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Seven for a Secret and reported the following:

Seven for a Secret’s plot is about the kidnapping of free Notherners of color from the streets of New York City. African American committees of vigilance sought to protect their loved ones from the worst imaginable sort of identity theft—being sold south of the Mason-Dixon line to plantations under false identities. The practice was widespread, and many law enforcement bodies turned a blind eye, or else were complicit in this form of systematic assault. Timothy Wilde and Valentine Wilde are arguing in a hackney cab on page 69, en route to try to free two black captives from the slave catchers known in the slang of the day as blackbirders.

As is weirdly usual for me, the Page 69 Test applies aptly to Seven for a Secret. In The Gods of Gotham, I introduced Timothy and Valentine Wilde, a pair of brothers who work for the inaugural NYPD. Timothy is passionate, moral, kindhearted, and an abolitionist social radical. His older brother Valentine, while no less principled at heart, is a feral Tammany Hall insider who comprehends that politics are savage and that the fledgling “copper stars” owe their existence to the Democratic Party—to that end, he argues that Timothy’s outspoken abolitionism is dangerous.

Then the obvious dawned—bright and painfully clear.

“The Irish,” I conceded. “Your voting majority. Every Irishman is a Democrat, and the Irish compete with the blacks. Fine. Why not gain some black voters to make up the difference?”

This time is was my turn to be stared at as if I were some monstrosity from Barnum’s American Museum.

“Timothy Wilde, I will slap the stupid out of you if it is the last thing I ever do,” Valentine vowed. “Blacks can’t vote.”

“Of course they can,” I said, frowning.

“They’re held to a property requirement. Whites can vote, if citizens. Blacks can vote if citizens who also own a minimum of two hundred and fifty dollars in property.”

My head listed back against the cab interior in considerable disgust. I live on fourteen dollars a week—four dollars more than the roundsmen—because Matsell seems to think the denser of the two Wildes something special. So if I counted up all my earthly goods, the sum of them would maybe total forty-five dollars. Maybe. That’s including my half of the fifty dollars in silver that Piest and I had left hidden in my office.

And I am richer far than almost every colored person I have ever met.

“Can any of them vote?” I wondered bleakly.

“Maybe two hundred or so of around ten thousand. And they sure as hell is warm don’t vote Democrat. The Liberty Party, now there are some abolitionists.”

“The whole process is a repulsive circus. I’m far more of an abolitionist than a Democrat.”

At the end of the page, elder brother Valentine loses his temper, reminding Timothy that his own employment by the Democratic Party kept the pair of them alive after their parents were killed in an accidental house fire (a house fire for which Valentine believes himself responsible). The emotional crux of the series hinges on the relationship between the two brothers, and the tense, emotional confrontation that follows reveals continuing guilt on Val’s part over the loss of their family, dedication to the political machine that saved their lives as orphans, as well as Tim’s inability to converse with his brother in a frank fashion about the tragedy that altered their lives as children.

Learn more about the book and author at Lyndsay Faye's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Gods of Gotham.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Translator"

Nina Schuyler's first novel, The Painting, was a finalist for the Northern California Book Awards. It was also selected by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the Best Books of 2004, and dubbed a “fearless debut” by MSNBC and a “great debut” by the Rocky Mountain News. It’s been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Serbian.

Her short story, “The Bob Society,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poems, short stories and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Santa Clara Review, Fugue, The Meadowland Review, The Battered Suitcase, and other literary journals. She reviews fiction for The Rumpus and The Children’s Book Review. She’s fiction editor at Able Muse.

Schuyler applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Translator, and reported the following:

Tumbling down a flight of stairs, Hanne is left with the ability to speak only Japanese. After a stay in the hospital, Hanne is finally home. Her son, Tomas, who has been in San Francisco to tend to her, departs for New York. Three things happen on this page that convey a sense of theme and trajectory. Hanne discovers her son’s doodling on his yellow legal pad. It’s a man on his back, his legs lifted in the air. The image reminds her of Picasso’s painting of a man on his back eating watermelon. Hanne wonders, has her son experienced her ecstatic delight? This is the reverse of the children-as-extensions-of-parents phenomenon. Here, the parent’s psyche burns bright inside a child’s interior landscape.

Second, Hanne’s son speaks Japanese, so Hanne has had a companion with whom she can converse. With her son gone, Hanne’s apartment is quiet, “deathly quiet.” Throughout the novel, there is the interplay of silence and sound. Hanne, being a translator, is keenly tied to sound, in particular words. She has, in fact, built a world of sound, and for her, it is the vessel of meaning. Her daughter, on the other hand, has retreated into silence—for six years, she has not spoken to Hanne. Hanne will find herself in situations where she fumbles with words, or where words are utterly irrelevant.

Finally, the deathly silence sends Hanne fleeing from her apartment, down to the lobby, to see if she can stop her son from leaving. She finds herself in the lobby. “How unlike her; she is standing in the foyer barefoot.” Hanne’s action—chasing after her son—will be repeated toward the end of the book. In so many ways she will have to step out of character, become “unlike” herself, stand bare, vulnerable, in order to get what she truly wants. (I’m being intentionally vague here because I don’t want to give away the ending.)

Learn more about the book and author at Nina Schuyler's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cure"

Douglas E. Richards is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Wired and its sequel, Amped. Richards has a master's degree in molecular biology (a.k.a.“genetic engineering”), and was a biotechnology executive for many years.

Richards applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Cure, and reported the following:

I opened the hardcover edition of The Cure and turned to page 69, certain this page would cover something relatively unimportant to the plot. Boy was I wrong! Imagine my surprise and delight to find this page is one of the most important in the entire book. What are the odds?

To understand why, here is the first paragraph of the book’s description, from the Jacket:

Psychopaths cause untold misery.

If you found the cure for this condition,

just how far would you go to use it?

Erin Palmer had a devastating encounter with a psychopath as a child. Now a grad student and scientist, she's devoting her life to studying these monsters. When her research catches the attention of Hugh Raborn, a brilliant neuroscientist who claims to have isolated the genes responsible for psychopathic behavior, Erin realizes it may be possible to reverse the condition, restoring souls to psychopaths. But to do so, she'll not only have to operate outside the law, but violate her most cherished ethical principles.

Page 69, to my dismay, is when Erin first speaks with Hugh Raborn. When he first tries to enlist her aid. And when she first becomes aware of the possibility of a cure for psychopathy, and some of the ethical and legal dilemmas this would bring about:

Raborn laughed. “I see you haven’t had many dealings with the FDA. They’d make a steel pipe look flexible. Trust me, they’d never let me begin a trial.”

Erin’s eyes narrowed. “I see. Why do I have a sick feeling that I know why you called me?”

“I need your help, Erin. I could sense your passion in the article I read. Your drive to give society a tool to deal with these monsters. It came through, loud and clear. And you’re one of only a handful of researchers going into prisons and studying psychopaths, and taking MRI’s of their brains on a daily basis.”

“You want me to test your therapy on my inmates, don’t you?”

There was another long silence on the line.

“You’re out of your mind,” said Erin.

“It’s the only way. It has to be done empirically.”

“Sure. And I go to jail.”

“No one will ever know. I’ll give you the therapeutic cocktail, and separately, the eight genes whose precise modulation is critical, at a wide variety of expression levels. You just have to add them to the mix in every possible combination until you find the one that works. It won’t be easy, since we can be all but certain the delicate balance of these genes that does the trick in mice won’t be the same balance needed in man. It took me hundreds of experiments, and it might take you the same. But when you’ve found the right combination, you’ll see a complete reversal of the condition. The brains of your psychopathic subjects will read as normals. Their amygdalas will light up when given emotionally charged words. And as I mentioned, these abnormal genes would not only be replaced, but expressed correctly. So their brain structures will revert to normal—they will be normal—at the level of their DNA. Right down to their sperm and ova. And your MRI data will be there to document the entire thing.”

“That’s how it’s supposed to work. But if there is one perfect combination of gene expression levels, I’m guessing there’s at least one imperfect combination. A combination that is lethal. How many mice did you kill along the way?”

“Surprisingly few,” said Raborn...

Learn more about the book and author at Douglas E. Richards’s website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cure.

Writers Read: Douglas E. Richards.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love and Lament"

John Milliken Thompson is the author of The Reservoir (Other Press, 2011). His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, the Washington Post, Islands, and other publications, and his short stories have been published in Louisiana Literature, South Dakota Review, and many other literary journals. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas and lives in Virginia.

Thompson applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Love and Lament, and reported the following:

From page 69:

She admired how lithe and handsome her brother was; she thought him about as handsome as any young man she knew, and she imagined that if he were not her brother she might have feelings for him. It was wrong to even have such a thought in her head, she knew, and she took her eyes away from him and stared at the ripples around her wrists. Could he possibly think of her in the same way?

I like this test, having used it on many novels I’ve read or thought about reading. I’ve never taken page 69, but it seems about the right point for a check. For most novels, that’s about a fifth of the way in. A traditional five-act structure would put you well into the action, the characters and conflict defined and moving to some kind of turn, with underlying themes starting to develop.

The quote above is from a picnic scene out in the country, at the mill owned by a grandfather who is cold and difficult. The theme of family struggle, both within itself and within its time period, continues here.

Mary Bet has just had her first menstrual period, and she and her brother are swimming in the river. For the first time, she notices him as a young man and is confused and scared by the sexual feeling she has for him. Her large family has been reduced by one tragedy after another, and the survivors have begun turning toward each other in their grief. Mary Bet will later attempt to determine exactly what happens to Siler, this sole remaining brother—doing so is imperative for her to be able to lay certain ghosts to rest and move on with her life.

Page 69 is perhaps a little dreamier than most of the novel, but I think it gives a good sense of the rest.

Learn more about the book and author at John Milliken Thompson's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Chum"

Jeff Somers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of the Avery Cates series of novels published by Orbit Books and The Ustari Cycle books Trickster and Fabricator (Pocket Books). He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Somers publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2006, edited by Scott Turow and his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris.

Somers applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Chum, and reported the following:

Page 69 is deceptive in Chum. If you land there and just read you get a page of a few people at a party making slightly off-kilter small talk. You’ll get the sense that not all is right. Some of the people on the page are straining too hard to appear cheerful. But you might not pick up on it right away. It opens with this line, of which I am quite fond:

“I licked my lips. She was looking for a response from me, but I felt made of tinder, dry and spidery. I opened my mouth and small, white spiders came out.”

On the other hand, page 69 has what 95% of the other pages have: People killing themselves with booze. In that sense, page 69 is actually a microcosm of the story: People get drunk, make mistakes, and never seem to make a connection between those two things. That’s not the entirety of the theme of Chum, but it’s a good part of it.

Also: Page 69 in Chum is kind of a great litmus test to see if you and I are going to be friends, drinking partners, the kind of people who wake each other up in the middle of the night to go bury treasure out on the beach, or if we’re instead the sort of people who glance up from newspapers on the subway and our eyes meet and we hate each other instantly, with a primitive primal rage we can neither articulate or understand.

In other words, if you read the banter on page 69 and don’t walk away thinking I’m a total jackass, you might actually enjoy the novel!

Learn more about the book and author at Jeff Somers's website.

My Book, The Movie: Chum.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Traveling with Spirits"

Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fourteen books. Her new novel is Traveling with Spirits. Other novels include After Eden, Range of Light, A Walking Fire, Winter’s Edge, Blood Sisters, All Good Women, Movement: A Novel in Stories, and Murder in the English Department. Her short fiction books include Abundant Light, The Night Singers and Trespassing. Her collection of essays is Rumors from the Cauldron: Selected Essays, Reviews and Reportage.

Miner applied the Page 69 Test to Traveling with Spirits and reported the following:

Of course I was terrified to see what was actually on page 69, but I got a nice surprise because the page reveals some of the major themes and settings in the novel. This page highlights the developing friendship between Monica and Sudha, a major relationship in the novel. Sudha is one of those characters who walked in and took over. She became a large presence in the novel to my surprise and delight. I shouldn’t have been surprised; so many of my novels feature important friendships. This relationship starts out with an edge of hostility and grows into a deep, affectionate, bantering, intensely confiding companionship.

Page 69 also gives a sense of how they navigate the Indian Hill Station where they both live. I’m pleased there’s a short flashback to Minneapolis. I like the incongruous juxtaposition of places. One of the pleasures of writing Traveling with Spirits was the chance to return to India every day as I wrote and rewrote the book over ten years. I came to develop a new fondness for Minneapolis by seeing it through Monica’s eyes.

The merchant regards her cautiously. His eyes brighten as Sudha ad­dresses him.

Monica knows enough Hindi to eavesdrop.

“Of course, Ma’am, we’ll be able to carry your groceries up the mountain with the broom and cereal and such. No, no charge. How long has Ma’am been shopping here? How long educating our children? We are flattered by your custom.”

“Sri Chawla, you are too kind.”

The parking lot at Lunds in Uptown was filled with winter filthy cars. Customers trudged warily on the Minnesota ice, leading the way as young men and women in green uniforms pushed shopping carts toward capa­cious trunks of Subarus and Volvos and Hondas. How much more anony­mous that life seems now. How long ago and far away.

Before striking farther uphill to the Mall, they graze stalls of Lower Bazaar for pens, paper, bars of soap. Not too much because after the Mall, where Monica will buy newspapers and a candy bar in a fancy shop, they’ll have a steep climb to their neighborhood. Once past Mr. Chawla’s store, they’re accountable for haulage.

She’s happy Sudha lives so near. Her small apartment block, 500 yards away, makes walking back at night easy. Thus she gets minimum flack about this “dubious practice” from Paterfamilias Walsh. She must develop a less confrontational attitude toward him. Has he simply re­placed Louise as adversary in her psychological landscape?

No trip to town is complete without a stop at the Kerala Coffee House. They have a special table in the relatively smoke-free back room with a view of Lower Bazaar.

“Whew. This town does keep a person fit,” Sudha sighs as she re­leases her packages. “But then, being American, you’re probably used to attending the gym daily and torturing yourself on those monstrous machines.”

Monica laughs, thinking about her gawkiness in aerobics class, then feels a pang of homesickness for the low impact course, the locker room chats with Beata. “You’re right, this is a great workout. I’ve lost a couple of pounds since coming to Moorty.”

“A pound or two, it makes a difference?”

Learn more about the book and author at Valerie Miner's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Valerie Miner.

My Book, The Movie: Traveling with Spirits.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Two of a Kind"

Yona Zeldis McDonough is the author of the novels A Wedding in Great Neck, Breaking the Bank, In Dahlia's Wake, and The Four Temperaments, as well as numerous books for children.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Two of a Kind, and reported the following:

I happen to think page 69 is a wonderful introduction to Two of a Kind. In the chapter where this page appears, Christina Connelly and Andy Stern go to an estate sale. When they first met at a wedding, she thought he was an obnoxious boor and he thought her frosty and cold. But as an interior designer she comes highly recommended so he offers her the job of redoing his apartment; she needs the money so she takes it. The actual sale is great; she finds treasures for Andy’s place and he is impressed by watching her in action. But when they drive off in search of lunch, her car breaks down and they are stranded—in a dead cell phone zone—by the side of the road. On page 69, they are walking along in search of a gas station. It’s hot, it’s buggy and pretty soon it starts to pour. Now they are soaked in addition to everything else. At first Christina welcomes the cooling rain but when she looks down, she is horrified to see her white T-shirt is plastered to her body and her thin, lace bra offers no protection at all—her nipples are entirely visible. She is mortified. Without remarking on her evident discomfort, Andy strips off his soaked shirt and gives it to her so she can cover herself. And then he begins to sing one of the songs from South Pacific—it turns out to be a favorite for both of them—and she overcomes her habitual reserve to join in. So it’s a page on which the whole nature of their relationship begins to change, and they start to view each other in a different way.

Learn more about the author and her work at Yona Zeldis McDonough's website.

My Book, The Movie: Two of a Kind.

--Marshal Zeringue

"My Notorious Life"

Kate Manning is the author of Whitegirl, a novel (Dial Press, 2002). A former documentary television producer for public television, she has won two New York Emmy Awards, and also written for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times Book Review, among others. She has taught creative writing at Bard High School Early College in Manhattan, where she lives with her boisterous family, including a dog named Moon, who walks her regularly.

Manning applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, My Notorious Life, and reported the following:

Set in the 1860’s, My Notorious Life follows the scrappy Axie Muldoon from her impoverished childhood on the Lower East Side of New York, to a wild journey on an “orphan train” out West, and ultimately to great wealth and success as a midwife and “females’ physician.” It’s a novel about longing. For home. For whoever might supply it, or wherever ir might be.

Page 69 is in several ways a good representative slice of the story. Although it doesn’t feature an example of Axie’s headstrong moxie, or her sense of humor, this scene is a pivotal moment. Here, Axie, thirteen years old, has just assisted her own mother in childbirth at home in a cold tenement room. Her wee newborn sister has turned limp and blue. Her stepfather, who has lost a wife and child before, is consumed by grief.

He cursed God and picked up the coal bucket and flang it at the wall. It hit with a terrible tin crash and clattered to the floor in a powder of black dust. My mother startled so her eyelids fluttered. Duffy made a strangled sound and went out the door.

The events on this page change Axie’s life irrevocably. The novel’s preoccupations with family, love, childbirth, and loss suffuse the moment. Later on page 69, Axie’s Aunt Bernie takes over at her mother’s bedside, in a manner that illustrates the everyday nature of tragedy in these “fevernests” and “dreadful rookeries of the poor.”

She found a strip of rag by the stove, which she gave to me.
—Run and tie this to the door and then tie the other half out front downstairs for the undertaker to see, she whispered.

Axie’s main worry in this early part of the novel is with her mother, and on page 69, she realizes that her beloved Mam is having trouble recovering from childbirth. Axie witnesses her aunt’s inept attempts to help.

Bernie was there beside Mam’s bed, kneeling low by her knees. She was busy with some articles, a bowl and a burlap sack and a bunch of chicken feathers and pressing hard on Mam’s belly... My eyes did not escape the bloody rags, the bowl dark with liquid.

This moment and the events of the day inform the course of Axie’s life, her choice of profession, and her determination to prevent such scenes as the one on page 69 from occurring again in the bedrooms and lying-in hospitals of 1860’s New York. After this scene, her fortunes improve, her voice grows more irreverent, and her story becomes quite rollicking in places. Page 69 does not feature a sample of Axie’s particular vernacular, in which, for example, her enemies include “a bitter old catamaran” a “pompous tub of lard, and some “cabbage-hearted weevils.” What it does show is how My Notorious Life is Axie’s testimony of loss and love, and why she translates both into a fierce defiance of authority and a defense of women and children.

Learn more about the book and author at Kate Manning's website.

--Marshal Zeringue