"Painted Hands"

Jennifer Zobair grew up in Iowa and attended Smith College and Georgetown Law School. She has practiced corporate and immigration law and as a convert to Islam, has been a strong advocate for Muslim women's rights. Zobair lives with her husband and three children outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Painted Hands, her first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel finds Muslim bad girl Zainab Mir at a political debate. Zainab is the outspoken communications director for a post-feminist, Camille Paglia-styled Senate candidate, and she’s just taken her seat to watch her candidate in action. I’m not sure how much this page would make sense out of context, but in some ways, it is representative of the book. There is a brief reference to the religious right in America not being “nuanced,” and, as Zainab’s mind wanders to an event at a mosque later that day, she recalls the Muslim men who didn’t let her attend her mother’s burial because of her gender. This sense that Zainab is struggling to find a place to fit in—both in her personal life and with respect to her rising public profile—in spite of right-wing bigots and conservative Muslims recurs throughout the novel and, in important ways, informs the climax of the novel.

This page also describes how the very beautiful and compelling Zainab had to tell a female reporter who is attracted to her that she is straight. Gay issues don’t figure prominently in the book, but they do appear. It’s an issue I think many communities need to handle better, including the Muslim community.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Navigator"

Michael Pocalyko is CEO of Monticello Capital, a boutique investment bank. He’s been a combat aviator, Navy commander, political candidate, venture capitalist, and global corporate chair. He has degrees from Muhlenberg, Harvard, and Wharton, and lives in northern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Navigator, and reported the following:

The contrarian way to look at the Page 69 Test is this: If you tore that page out of the book, would you miss anything important? Viewed that way, all I can say is . . . Wow. I could not have selected a better page for you to meet Warren Hunter—at a moment that’s critical to the plot of The Navigator, a literary financial thriller whose marketing tagline is “Wall Street Comes to Washington.”

Warren is the reigning master of the financial universe, the dealmaker at Compton Sizemore, Wall Street’s last real partnership left standing after the financial crisis. He’s about to close ViroSat, the world’s first trillion-dollar deal. On page 69 he’s explaining the state-of-the-deal to his team.

“This deal breaks out to be twenty-one percent equity, making our leverage ratio less than four to one. The number is two hundred eighty-seven point seven billion in cash equity at the closing valuation. The remainder is in the debt issues, comprising all of that wide range of legal types you’re so concerned about. The debt encompasses the national contributions and the big bonds. Equity ownership of ViroSat, however, is more closely controlled. All of the required cash is in the assembly process. It will be aggregated in our house account through a rather elegant limited partnership arrangement. So it’s appropriate for me to review with you how we do a limited partnership here at Compton Sizemore. The limited partners hold limited partnership shares. They own the entire economic interest of the partnership, which is just a fund, a collection of cash. The general partner— who is here also a limited partner— manages the fund, investing it, charging just a minimum fee until the project is harvested. In this case, that harvest will happen when we sell ViroSat, because our limited partnership will own one hundred percent of the equity in this deal.”

He let that part sink in. The gang of fourteen here, as the entire investment banking team at Compton Sizemore called them, had not yet heard about the equity funding, the ownership of ViroSat. Until this moment, Warren Hunter had brushed aside all inquiry.

“The moment ViroSat closes,” he continued, “we begin immediately to execute our harvest strategy. No hesitation. After the sale— and I expect a significant run- up in value—we distribute the proceeds. First the limited partners get paid back their original investment. Then the remainder, the gain in the investment, the value we create, is split eighty-twenty. Eighty percent to the limited partners, twenty percent to the general partner. “This is precisely why ViroSat is and will remain a private transaction. This is also why our present structure of closing this preliminary financing, rather than making a direct offering to the public, is critical. No one needs to know the least bit of information about the composition of our ViroSat limited partnership. It is immaterial.

“You may, however, want to know one important feature about the management of this funding mechanism. The general partner, especially with skin in the game, has an incendiary motivation to do well. He also controls each of your personal destinies in the entire financial services industry. That general partner would be me.”

The news took a long moment to digest.

Warren Hunter, limited partner and general partner, was backing ViroSat himself. The deal was brilliant, innovative, and amazing to all of them, it was perfectly legal. He was right. Whoever else he might have in the deal was immaterial. He was not only running it, he was also owning and controlling the biggest deal on the Street. And the Street had become a planet.

The beauty—and the challenge—of writing a financial thriller is that this form of the novel is intrinsically technical and high-risk, just like the deal world where I live professionally. All of the pieces have to fit together, just like Warren’s ViroSat deal has to coalesce precisely, with tight tolerances.

This page also showcases one of The Navigator’s most important big themes: The Street has become a planet.

As a reader, it makes you think as you dream, as you’re entertained, as you escape.

The best fiction does that. It’s what I was aiming for right there on page 69.

View the video trailer for The Navigator, and learn more about the book and author at Michael Pocalyko's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wonder Bread Summer"

Jessica Anya Blau's books include the nationally bestselling novel The Summer of Naked Swim Parties and the critically acclaimed Drinking Closer to Home.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Wonder Bread Summer, and reported the following:

Page 69 takes place at the end of the blind date Allie has with a quadriplegic porn producer. I realize this sounds far-fetched, but this part of the story is based on my life. When I was twenty, I had two very different encounters with middle-aged men in wheelchairs. The first was a quadriplegic who liked to sit next to me in the café where I studied for classes. He communicated via a head pointer that he banged onto words on a Ouji-like board that spanned the arms of his wheelchair. One day his wife approached me and asked if I were interested in being in one of his movies—erotic movies, I’d have sex with him and his wife. I declined. They were not making porn, like my character, they were making what they considered art. He even got an NEA grant for his erotic films. The second thing that happened that year is that I was set up on a blind date and when I showed up, I found a rotund, middle-aged, shiny-faced, bald man in a wheelchair. He was drunk when I arrived and trashed by the time we left. I think I was a little drunk, too—this was before I stopped drinking. Here’s a paragraph from page 69:

Allie tried to push the wheelchair through the restaurant. There was greasy-looking carpet on the floor, which made it hard for the wheels to move. Allie started and stopped several times. Then, just as she got some momentum, she missed the door being held open by Bud, and she pushed Roger into the doorframe. Roger squeal-laughed.

“Smooth move,” Bud laughed.

Allie pulled back and aimed for the doorway again. It felt as thought she was trying to thread a needle.

The incident with Allie rolling Roger into the wall is from real life, too. When my best friend in college got into a car accident, she spent about a month in a wheelchair. One night we went out drinking and I missed the doorway as we were trying to leave and rolled her into a doorframe. She’s forgiven me for that.)

Learn more about the book and author at Jessica Anya Blau's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Jessica Anya Blau and Pippa.

--Marshal Zeringue

"If You Were Here"

Alafair Burke's novels include “two power house series” (Sun-Sentinel) that have earned her a reputation for creating strong, believable, and eminently likable female characters, such as NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher and Portland Deputy District Attorney Samantha Kincaid.

Burke's new novel is the stand-alone, If You Were Here.

She applied the Page 69 Test to the novel and reported the following:

At first glance, page 69 seems unrepresentative of If You Were Here. After all, the novel's central story is about former prosecutor turned journalist McKenna Jordan's search for Susan Hauptmann, a friend who disappeared without a trace ten years earlier. Page 69, which sees NYPD Detective Joe Scanlin frustrated by the questioning of a suspect's wife, mentions neither McKenna nor Susan.

But Scanlin, though a secondary character, is one of my favorite characters in the novel and provides some of the most important glue between present and past. He is the seasoned detective who handled the investigation into Susan Hauptmann's disappearance. He also happens to hate McKenna Jordan. To Scanlin, McKenna will always be the ladder-climbing careerist who once accused a fellow officer of lying about a shooting in the case that ultimately ended McKenna's career. But McKenna's current search for her lost friend forces him to realize that he wasn't at the top of his game a decade earlier.

One of the recurring questions of If You Were Here is whether you can ever make up for the past and become a different person. Scanlin and McKenna are both struggling with that question in different ways.

From page 69:

Two hours later, Joe Scanlin was back at the Twelfth Precinct. The estranged wife of a suspect in yet another drug-related killing had agreed to come in for questioning.

He knew the history. Six 911 calls made from their shared address just in the last four years. Three arrests of the husband for domestic violence. One time she went to the hospital with a broken jaw. No charges ever filed.

She moved out two months earlier when Child Protective Services threatened to take her kids if they continued to witness the violence against her.

But “separated” and “separate” weren’t synonymous.

“Kenny don’t sell,” the woman insisted. “He don't even use. No way he’d have something to do with that. His no-good friends always dragging him down. That’s all that is. They the ones did this. Don’t you listen to their noise.”

Scanlin walked out of the interrogation room while she was talking. He didn’t need to hear the rest. Been there too many times. She wasn’t under arrest, but he knew she’d stay there in the box until he told her she was allowed to leave. No one ever tried to leave, certainly not a woman who’d gotten used to being beat on.

Learn more about the book and author at Alafair Burke's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rush"

National bestselling author Eve Silver has been praised for her “edgy, steamy, action-packed” books, darkly sexy heroes and take-charge heroines. Her work has garnered starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards, Library Journal’s Best Genre Fiction Award, and a Romance Writers of America® RITA® Award nomination. Rush, the first book in Silver’s new sci-fi teen series, is now available from Katherine Tegen Books/HarperCollins.

Sliver lives with her gamer husband and sons, along with an energetic Airedale terrier and an exuberant border collie/shepherd.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Rush and reported the following:

In my debut young adult release, Rush, sixteen year old Miki Jones is dragged into a game where she must hunt aliens or be hunted by them. Between matches, she’s dropped back into her real world, the one where she runs five days a week at the crack of dawn, deals with school and homework, and struggles with grief over the recent loss of her mother.

Page 69 finds Miki dropped back into her life after her first encounter with the game.

We’re in exactly the same place—and time—as we were before everything happened. Before the lobby and the weapons and the aliens and the battle. Richelle said the hours were banked. I guess we just made a withdrawal.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“We live our lives.” There’s an edge to Luka’s answer, a tinge of bitterness.

And Miki’s left wondering, “So what’s the game now? This or the life I used to know?”

Learn more about the book and author at Eve Silver's website and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sparta"

Roxana Robinson's new novel is Sparta.

She is the author of four earlier novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography Georgia O'Keeffe: A Life. Four of these were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, More, and Vogue, among other publications.

Robinson applied the Page 69 Test to Sparta and reported the following:

This page shows my protagonist, Conrad Farrell, after four years in the Marines. He has been deployed twice to Iraq and now is back home, and sitting in the library with his parents, watching a movie – one of his favorites, Life of Brian. Conrad is trying to relax, in the civilian world, but he’s finding it increasingly difficult. Everything here feels strange and unfamiliar. His own bedroom upstairs feels no longer like his:

Here there was no room for him as an adult, the closet was still filled with his childhood clothes. He was a child here. But where else was there?...They settled in to watch the movie…It was a relief to sink into it, to feel the dark fist of pressure against his chest begin to release. To laugh out loud.

As the movie went on, the first against his heart began to clench again. Crowds of robed people milled about, pressing bodies, confusion, growing chaos. He wanted someone to take charge. His heart was speeding up and he felt the swollen surge in his throat. He watched them stand up in the amphitheatre, dangerously outlined against the sky, the crowd below shouting and mutinous. Conrad stood up and left the room. He closed the library door and went through the darkened kitchen, on out the back door.

The book is about just this problem – how can Conrad re-enter the world he left? Even the most familiar things – his house, his parents, his favorite movies – have become unknown to him. He has become unknown to himself. I was struck by this fact as I began this project – how veterans had been changed by the war, and how they were helpless afterwards, and unable to change themselves back to the people they had once been.

Learn more about the book and author at Roxana Robinson’s website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bookman's Tale"

Charlie Lovett is a writer, teacher, and playwright, whose plays for children have been seen in more than 3,000 productions. He is a former antiquarian bookseller and an avid book collector. He and his wife, Janice, split their time between Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Kingham, Oxfordshire, in England.

Lovett applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Bookman's Tale: A Novel of Obsession, and reported the following:

Who knew? Page 69 is actually quite the window into The Bookman’s Tale. On the surface, not much happens on page 69. Someone named Peter checks his answering machine. Yet many of the major characters in the book are mentioned on page 69: the widowed antiquarian bookseller Peter Byerly, his late wife Amanda, his mentors in the world of rare books Hank Christiansen and Francis Leland. The mystery that Peter is wrestling with is alluded to on page 69: the mystery of how a Victorian watercolor that fell out of a book he found in an old bookshop could so accurately picture his dead wife. And then there is that answering machine message—a message that sends Peter off on the adventure that rapidly takes over the book. That message leads Peter to discover what may be his Holy Grail—a book that could settle once and for all the question of who really wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. If you glance at page 69, you are likely to glimpse words and phrases that get to the heart of what (and where) The Bookman’s Tale is all about: Kingham, watercolor, rare books, margin notes, library, and of course Amanda. For The Bookman’s Tale, as much as anything else, is the story of a widower finally coming to terms with his grief—and it’s just possible that that phone message on page 69 is what starts him in that direction. But to find out, you’ll have to read page 70!

Learn more about the book and author at Charlie Lovett's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Burning"

Elana K. Arnold completed her M.A. in Creative Writing/Fiction at the University of California, Davis. She grew up in Southern California, where she was lucky enough to have her own horse--a gorgeous mare named Rainbow--and a family who let her read as many books as she wanted. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, two children, and a menagerie of animals.

Arnold applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Burning, and reported the following:

Page 69 [inset below, click to enlarge] finds us in the middle of a Tarot reading. Lala White is explaining to Ben Stanley the meaning of his Root of the Matter card--he has drawn the Hanged Man. In this card, he sees his father-- as he says on page 68, "On it was a man, swinging from one knee upside down from a a tree branch, his hands behind his back as if bound, his face corpse white. The same color as my dad's face after a day of work at the mine, coated with a fine layer of gypsum dust."

Ben Stanley lives in tiny Gypsum, Nevada, which is about to become a ghost town as the mine closes and everyone is forced to leave. Ben has a Golden Ticket--a full ride on a track/academic scholarship to UC San Diego--but he's leaving behind his family and friends. Those same friends have taken him to the canvas tent set up just outside the entrance to Burning Man, where Lala White and her family are telling fortunes to earn some extra cash.

On this page, we see some of Ben's despair, and his guilt: he's sure his Pops--and everyone else he loves--is screwed. Moreover, he sees himself, the "busy boy" on the Eight of Pentacles, who has worked really hard and is seeing the fruition of that work. But he can't let himself feel excitement or pride over his accomplishments. Right now, on page 69 of Burning, his guilt blinds him to everything else.

This book is about freedom and responsibility, about choice and repercussions. It's about love. It's about passion. And it's about creating our own futures, regardless of what the cards may say.

Learn more about the book and author at Elana K. Arnold's website and blog.

Writers Read: Elana K. Arnold (November 2012).

Writers Read: Elana K. Arnold.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Golem and the Jinni"

Helene Wecker grew up in Libertyville, Illinois, a small town north of Chicago, and received her Bachelor’s in English from Carleton College in Minnesota. After graduating, she worked a number of marketing and communications jobs in Minneapolis and Seattle before deciding to return to her first love, fiction writing. Accordingly, she moved to New York to pursue a Master’s in fiction at Columbia University.

She now lives near San Francisco with her husband and daughter.

Wecker applied the Page 69 Test to The Golem and the Jinni, her first novel, and reported the following:

I turned to page 69 of The Golem and the Jinni, and this is what I found:

But going by the immediate flood of visitors to Arbeely's shop, it grew clear that Maryam had not waited for their visit; rather, in her enthusiastic manner, she had spread the story of the tinsmith's new Bedouin apprentice far and wide. Arbeely's own little coffeepot bubbled constantly on the brazier as the entire neighborhood filed in and out, eager to meet the newcomer.

Thankfully, the Jinni performed his part well. He entertained the visitors with tales of his supposed crossing and ensuing illness, but never spoke so long that he risked tangling himself in his story. Instead, he painted in broad strokes the picture of a wanderer who one day decided, on little more than a whim, to steal away to America.

We're in turn-of-the-20th-century New York, in the neighborhood of Little Syria. The Jinni is an actual jinni (a.k.a. genie). He's recently arrived in New York - rather suddenly, in fact, exploding out of a copper flask. And now he's got to learn how to pass as human, and fit in among his neighbors. His accomplice in this is Boutros Arbeely, the tinsmith who released him from the flask by accident. Arbeely is the only person in New York who knows the truth about the Jinni. To the rest of the neighborhood - now meeting him for the first time - he's simply Arbeely's new apprentice, a Bedouin named Ahmad.

I'm amused, reading this passage, by how much of the Jinni's personality is on display. He's a smooth character, when he wants to be; and although he hates his situation - he's trapped in human form, a thousand years and half the world away from his home - he's got absolutely no problem lying about it to an entire neighborhood. In fact, he's enjoying himself. Arbeely, meanwhile, is going mental with worry. He hates having to lie to his friends and neighbors, and he's terrified they're going to slip up somehow. This dynamic - Arbeely worrying, the Jinni scoffing at his worry - is the main pattern in their relationship. They're like a quasi-supernatural Odd Couple, and their arguments were a lot of fun to write.

But even though the Jinni has no qualms about lying, the lie itself - the act of passing - is going to take its toll on him. Part of him already knows this. On the next page, he reflects on having to take a human name: "To him the new name suggested that the changes he'd undergone were so drastic, so pervasive, that he was no longer the same being at all." Over the next few hundred pages, this sense of doubt, of alienation from his true self, is going to lead him into a number of adventures and misadventures - as well as an uneasy friendship with a woman he meets one night, a woman who's just as much of an outsider as he is.

View the video trailer for The Golem and the Jinni and visit Helene Wecker's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wheatyard"

Peter Anderson is a native of the Chicago area who works in the city as a financial professional and lives in Joliet. He recently published his debut novella, Wheatyard.

Anderson applied the Page 69 Test to Wheatyard and reported the following:

First off, a confession: I cheated. Though I'm writing this piece for The Page 69 Test blog, I'm actually basing it on page 99 of my novella, Wheatyard. When Marshal and I first talked about doing this, I quickly realized that page 69 of the book is the opening of a chapter, and thus mostly introductory and not terribly essential to the overall narrative, while page 99 is in the middle of a chapter and much more representative of the story. But when I suggested to Marshal that I write a piece for The Page 99 Test, he informed me that Page 99 is mostly nonfiction, while Page 69 is devoted to fiction. (Despite reading all of the Campaign for the American Reader blogs for many years, I had never noticed that distinction.) Generous soul that he is, however, Marshal said I could take whatever liberties I liked to make this work. Thus, here is my analysis of page 99 of Wheatyard, appearing at The Page 69 Test.

Wheatyard tells the story of the brief, unlikely friendship of Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard, a reclusive, eccentric writer and the unnamed narrator, a business school graduate who is stuck, jobless, in an Illinois college town after graduation. For most of the book, Wheatyard prods the narrator toward taking up writing, He cites writing's merits as self-expression, a creative outlet and a way to interpret the world, but mostly meets indifference from the narrator, who sees writing as a momentary distraction from what should be his sole task - finding a job and launching his financial career. On page 99, Wheatyard again prods the narrator.

"Start right away. Not tomorrow, not next week, but today. On your way home, observe as many details as you can, smell all the scents in the air and figure out where they came from, drop into a few stores even if you're not buying anything, listen to people talk. Then for the rest of the walk, think about everything you observed and come up with something to say about it. When you get home, sit down right away and write out all those insights. Don't worry if none of it is profound. Being profound comes with time."

This passage is a good example of the superior, almost professorial attitude which Wheatyard assumes whenever he interacts with the narrator. Wheatyard is always telling, almost demanding, what the narrator should do - sometimes politely (as in the above), sometimes with irritation. Wheatyard (unpublished, alone, unemployed and nearly destitute) doesn't have much going for him in his life, and thus his friendship with the narrator gives him the rare opportunity to assume the role of a wizened elder, imparting his wisdom and using the implied superiority to boost his self-esteem.

Earlier on this page, Wheatyard also describes how he jots down every little fragment of prose that comes to mind, all of which are either immediately used in whatever manuscript he's working on at the moment (he's intensively prolific, and has dozens of lengthy manuscripts) or saved for some future project. This helps explain how Wheatyard's chaotic narratives (crammed with hundreds of fictional and real-life characters from throughout history, interacting with no regard for chronological or situational plausibility) come about. He assembles all of these diverse fragments into narrative, making connections between characters and situations that seem tenuous at first but ultimately, upon close reading, make sense.

Overall, page 99 both illustrates Wheatyard's relationship with the narrator and gives a glimpse of his writing process. And certainly far better than page 69 would have done.

Learn more about the book and author at Peter Anderson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dead Insider"

Victoria Houston is the author of the Loon Lake Mysteries, which are set in the Northwoods of Wisconsin against a background of fishing – fly fishing as well as fishing for muskie, bass, bluegill and walleyes.

Houston applied the Page 69 Test to Dead Insider, the thirteenth book in the series, and reported the following:

I am pleased (and surprised!) with Page 69 for a couple reasons. First, it catches a main character, Doc Osborne, puzzling over another character’s loneliness. As he wonders, he thinks back to a similar time in his own life – so we learn about Doc Osborne losing his wife and how he slipped into alcoholism. At that point the story shifts to “real time,” in which a note is discovered by a young woman – a note about a hat and six bluegills. What? Who ARE these people? And so we have Page 69: a page full of guesses.

Learn more about the book and author at Victoria Houston's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sacred Games"

Gary Corby is a novelist and former systems programmer at Microsoft. He lives in Australia with his wife and two daughters. His debut novel is The Pericles Commission.

Corby applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Sacred Games, and reported the following:

Sacred Games is a mystery set at the ancient Olympics of 460BC. A Spartan athlete has been murdered. An Athenian stands accused. Nicolaos must either prove the Athenian did it -- and that Athenian happens to be Nico's best friend -- or he must prove his friend innocent. Either way, if the case isn't made it could lead to war between Sparta and Athens.

Page 69 sees my hero Nicolaos meet the famous praise singer Pindar. Praise singers were poets-for-hire who, for a fee, would write and then sing the victory song of a winning athlete. Pindar was the greatest praise singer of his day. He might even have written the two most famous lines of poetry of all time: the epitaph for the 300 who held the pass at Thermopylae ("Passer-by, go tell the Spartans, that here, according to their law, we lie.")

This is all very relevant to the story because Pindar has crucial evidence for Nico, which he's about to tell him. Pindar likes Nico and is very willing to help him. But Pindar will equally assist the Spartan investigator Markos, who's been put on the job representing Sparta. It's this contest between Nico and the Spartan Markos to solve the crime that fascinates Pindar.

It's a very real contest too, and very official: the judges who control the Games have sworn both Nico and Markos by the Olympic Oath, to hunt down the killer. For the first time in history, murder investigation is an Olympic event.

Learn more about the book and author at Gary Corby's blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Pericles Commission.

Writers Read: Gary Corby (November 2010).

My Book, The Movie: The Pericles Commission.

My Book, The Movie: The Ionia Sanction.

Writers Read: Gary Corby (November 2011).

The Page 69 Test: The Ionia Sanction.

--Marshal Zeringue