"The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells"

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of The Story of a Marriage and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named one of the best books of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and received a California Book Award. He is currently a fellow at the New York Public Library Cullman Center. He lives in San Francisco.

Greer applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, and reported the following:

Here is page 69:

Later, as we made our way to the restaurant in a cab, I told him I had misstepped slightly in my conversation with his wife, and Felix glared at me with his lower lip pressed out. He was thinking something through. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Of course that’s fine, I just forgot to tell her. She knows Alan, he did my will. Don’t make her think my life is so mysterious, bubs.” He laughed, then looked out the window the way you do in cabs, finger to his chin, and I understood how deep he must be in.

* * *

How strange. To step into the Oak Room in my velvet dress and feathered explosion of a hat, purse under my arm like a baguette, chandelier glitter on everyone’s shoulders and see Alan there!

Sitting at table with his hands in a teepee, waiter beside him, silver hair cut military style, a wide-shouldered suit, but the same square lined face as ever! Same green glazed eyes! Big and broad and healthy as he had been when I’d first met him, years before. I wanted to run up and tell some old Felix joke only we knew and see his Midwestern countenance turn red with pleasure. Then pat my arm to comfort me. Over the beloved dead.

But I couldn’t. Because Felix was not dead. He was here beside me, talking to the maitre d’. And I couldn’t run up to Alan because he didn’t know me. I was only now—as he stood up and visibly, nervously swallowed—meeting him for the first time.

“Hello,” I said, smiling and taking his hand, “So you’re my brother’s lover?”

It makes no sense at all! And why? Because it's a novel with a conceit—that Greta Wells wakes up in alternative versions of her world, ones in which she and everyone she knows are living in different eras—and without understanding that conceit, this just looks like madness! Which is rather fun for me, because of course it is madness! Greta, in whose 1985 her brother Felix has died, has found herself in a 1941 world where her brother is alive! And here she is being introduced to a man she knew very well in her world—Felix' lover Alan—as if they were strangers. To the men, it is normal. To Greta, it is absurd and wonderful. I had a great deal of fun with this scene, but I wonder what on earth a reader would make of it picking up the book!

Learn more about the book and author at Andrew Sean Greer's website and follow him on Facebook.

Writers Read: Andrew Sean Greer.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wishing Hill"

Holly Robinson is an award-winning journalist whose work appears regularly in national venues such as Better Homes and Gardens, Family Circle, Huffington Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, More, Open Salon, and Parents. She also works as a ghost writer on celebrity memoirs, education texts, and health books. Her first book, The Gerbil Farmer’s Daughter: A Memoir, was named a Target Breakout Book. Her first novel, Sleeping Tigers, was named a 2011 Book of the Year Finalist by ForeWord Reviews and was more recently listed as a Semifinalist 2012 Best Indie Book by Kindle Book Review. She holds a B.A. in biology from Clark University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Robinson applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Wishing Hill, and reported the following:

Shortly after my dad died, my mother moved to an apartment just two blocks from my house and I assumed responsibility for getting her settled as she mourned her loss. Though my mom is, thankfully, still in good health even in her early eighties, this event inspired me to write my new novel, The Wishing Hill. Checking out page 69 highlights one of the main themes threading through the novel, which is that becoming a caretaker for an aging parent can stir up an emotional tsunami of grief, irritation, rebellion, joy, disappointment—you name it.

The novel's main character, Juliet Clark, gave up her life in California to follow the man she loved to Mexico and pursue her dream of being an artist. When her brother asks her to come home to wintery New England and care for their ailing mother, a flamboyant actress, Juliet hesitates. She and her self-absorbed mother, Desiree, have always clashed. Plus, nobody back home knows about her divorce—or the fact that she’s pregnant and her ex-husband is not the father. Juliet intends to get her mother back on her feet and return to Mexico fast, but instead she's drawn into a a long-running feud between her mother and a reclusive neighbor. Little does she know that these relationships hold the key to shocking secrets about her family and herself that have been hiding in plain sight.…

On page 69, Juliet has come home from Mexico and is visiting her mother at the nursing home where Desiree is recovering from hip surgery. During this scene, Desiree chides Juliet for feeling sad about her marriage breaking up, then has a fit when Juliet says that she has called a contractor to renovate the house to make it more accessible to Desiree as she ages. The tensions between them are plain in this bit of dialogue:

“You've gained weight,” Desiree observed, cocking her head at Juliet. “Stress eating since he left you?”

“Probably.” Juliet crossed her arms in front of the borrowed sweater.

“I don't imagine you can help it,” Desiree said. “It's lucky you can eat, of course. When I lost my first love, Buddy, I couldn't choke down a thing. Everyone kept telling me I should be a model—I was that thin. I'm sure I would have faded to nothing if your father hadn't come along to distract me.”

“You look good now.”

“That's because I make an effort. The difference between looking good and letting yourself go is really just a matter of ten minutes a day devoted to skin care and a little willpower about what you put in your mouth.”

Learn more about the book and author at Holly Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Nearer Home"

Born in Miami, Joy Castro is the author of The Truth Book: A Memoir (University of Nebraska), the literary thriller Hell or High Water (St. Martin’s), and the essay collection Island of Bones (University of Nebraska).

Castro applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Nearer Home, which is a sequel to Hell or High Water, and reported the following:

Page 69 quietly suggests several issues that are important in Nearer Home. It opens with the protagonist, Nola Céspedes, going for her usual morning run—which has become anything but routine:

When it’s time to run alongside the length of Audubon Park on St. Charles, I watch for suspicious lurkers. A few joggers run in pairs on the asphalt track. I stick to the sidewalk.

Nola is cautious because she discovered, on her usual run only the day before, a dead body in Audubon Park. And it was someone she knew: her former journalism professor at Tulane. Even though she’s been working the crime beat at the Times-Picayune for a year, Nola is still shaken. Audubon Park and St. Charles are high-end areas of New Orleans; middle-class white people who play by the rules, like her professor, are supposed to be safe there. Nearer Home takes that assumption apart.

It’s also telling that Nola, unlike the joggers who run together in pairs, runs alone. Hell or High Water established her as a lone wolf, and though she’s opening up a bit in Nearer Home, she’s still fundamentally on her own.

In the next paragraph, another key issue arises:

Sweat soaked, I get home and let myself into the silent apartment, reveling in the double shower heads and ample water pressure of Soline’s walk-in shower.

Nola has been subletting from Soline, her wealthy friend, because of the sluggish post-Katrina housing market. As a girl who grew up in the projects, Nola loves the unaccustomed luxuries, but she can’t quite get used to them. For her, there’s a psychological tension between calling it “home” and the fact that it’s still “Soline’s.”

Once I’m dressed for work—black blouse, red skirt—I call Senator Claiborne’s office for an interview. I give my press credentials, leaving out the fact that my usual beat is crime.

Here we see Nola dressing in characteristically dramatic colors. Then she calls the senator whose information has turned up on the dead professor’s computer. The fact that Nola deliberately fails to mention her position as a crime reporter is typical; she’s not above lies of omission, or worse, to get her story. In fact, she tells the secretary that she plans “to write a positive profile, a feature in preparation for his 2010 campaign.”

Because Senator Claiborne’s secretary is reluctant to schedule the interview, the rest of the page consists of Nola’s attempts to sweet-talk her way in the door—which she ultimately succeeds in doing. Very typical Nola.

Learn more about the book and author at Joy Castro’s website and Twitter perch.

The Page 69 Test: Hell or High Water.

Writers Read: Joy Castro (July 2012).

Writers Read: Joy Castro.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mystery Girl"

David Gordon was born in New York City. He attended Sarah Lawrence College and holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature and an MFA in Writing, both from Columbia University, and has worked in film, fashion, publishing, and pornography. His first novel, The Serialist, won the VCU/Cabell First Novel Award and was a finalist for an Edgar Award. His work has also appeared in The Paris Review, Purple, and Fence among other publications.

Gordon applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Mystery Girl, and reported the following:

From Page 69:

It was MJ. Apparently she hadn’t gone home after all. I knocked. The voice stopped abruptly, and a brown eye, bright but glazed with a wine reduction, appeared in the little tear. I waved at the eyeball and it blinked. The door opened. She looked a little off, with a crooked smile and a bottle in her hand.

“Why are you still here?”

I gathered from her mutterings that she’d been fighting with her girlfriend, which helped explain her bitter take on relationships earlier in the evening. Drawn by nostalgia, she’d remained in the empty bookstore to drink, recite poetry, and curse womankind, and we ended up moping side by side on the bookstore’s back steps, where her old desk and abandoned belongings had been dumped by the painters. I found such conversations enormously rewarding, being able to rage against my wife, love, and female inconstancy, without threatening my image of myself as a liberated, prowoman type, though I was still too inhibited to refer to “bitches” with MJ’s utter contempt.

In the end, however, even my anti-life-partner turned on me. “You know what your problem is? How come no one wants to read your books?” She drunkenly poked my heart with her finger. “You can’t tell a fucking story.” Especially when drunk, MJ cursed with the relish of the deeply uptight, savoring the juice of her sin, while a degenerate like Milo, who might ask your aunt to please pass the fucking salt, didn’t even realize he might offend.

“What do you mean can’t?” I asked.

“Contraction of can fucking not.”

“I just told you the whole sad story of my marriage.”

“That was a goddamn bummer. A boring bummer. A borner, which is the opposite of a boner.”

“I agree. That’s my point. I choose not to tell stories. They’re borners. Traditional narrative structure seems totally irrelevant to actual experience today. I mean, what in your life has a regular beginning, middle, and end?”

She shrugged. “How about the part where I’m born, live awhile and die? With blank pages before and after.”

“OK, point taken. But then what about all those poets you read? They don’t make sense either.”

“Poems are short. They don’t have to make sense. Like a day at the beach or a quick fuck. Novels take forever. Like life or marriage or grad school. They need some kind of payoff. A reason to go on.”

“Maybe you’re right.” I sighed. “Maybe I’ve just wasted the last twenty years.”

“Well don’t fill another novel bitching about it.” She punched my arm, kind of hard. “Let’s just fuck.”

Hmm. Well first let me admit that I cheated slightly. Too lazy to type in the text, and without a final copy handy, I cut and pasted this from a proof so it may include a wee bit of page 70 too, but it looked like a good place to stop. It is an odd but perhaps fitting sample. MJ is the protagonist’s friend and former employer, a gay woman who owned a bookshop and did grad work on Modernist poetry. Sam, the narrator, is an aspiring (and despairing) experimental fiction writer who ends up working as a detective after his wife leaves him and MJ’s bookshop closes. Here he finds MJ drunk in her now empty shop, and they are arguing about writing, so it has little direct bearing on the plot, but it does I think give us a glimpse of the kind of people I wanted to write about: smart, foolish, passionate, desperate, angry, horny, heartsick and obsessed with literature, life, love but not having much success solving the mystery of any of it. But don’t worry; there are shoot-outs, sex scenes, succubi and Satanists in the book as well, so it is a proper mystery and not just an emotional and existential thriller.

Learn more about the book and author at David Gordon's blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Serialist.

Writers Read: David Gordon.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane"

Kelly Harms is a former editor and literary agent who has worked with a wide array of bestselling and award-winning authors of commercial fiction. She traded New York City for the writing life in Madison, Wisconsin, where she lives with her adorable and sometimes imperious toddler Griffin.

Harms applied the Page 69 Test to The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane, her first novel, and reported the following:

The Good Luck Girls of Shipwreck Lane is the story of two women with the same name—and both become convinced they’ve won the Home Sweet Home million dollar house sweepstakes on their favorite cable network. On page 69, Janey (Janine Brown), Nean (also Janine Browne) and Janey’s cantankerous great Aunt Midge have all arrived at the house they all believe they own outright, and are negotiating the terms of their predicament.

Nean (narrating here) has gotten an idea into her head about how to manipulate her competition. And though she knows she’s wading in rather deep, she plummets ahead…

I look back and forth between them, pretending to weigh my options. “I just don’t know who to trust…”

“If you’re in some bad trouble, maybe you should talk to the police. They’ll help you,” Janey says.

“Or just tell us,” says Aunt Midge with a greedy expression. “We won’t tell a soul, will we, Janey?”

I look to Janey for confirmation. She looks at Aunt Midge. “I don’t know… Maybe it’s better if she goes to the authorities with whatever it is.”

“I could never do that,” I tell her. “It’s too, too… dangerous.” Then I purse my lips and look off into the distance as though I’m trying not to cry.

That does it for Aunt Midge. She is frothing at the mouth with curiosity. “Janey, tell her you won’t tell anyone. Swear it.” Her voice is authoritative enough that even I would obey—so I know reliable Janey will do as she says. She nods.

“Fine. I won’t tell anyone. But I still think you could go to the police.”

I wait another moment for the anticipation to build even more, then take another swig of cold coffee. When I’ve swallowed, I look straight at them and deliver the clincher.

And the excerpt must end there! I cannot deliver the clincher because that would spoil some of the surprise. And yes, this book was written with surprise in mind. In some ways it even surprised me as I was writing it—both main characters were so set in their incredibly dysfunctional ways that they were always going off and doing wild and unhelpful things when I was trying to herd them along into the routes of my plot.

Lucky for all of us, I eventually let them take over, and they had a good time of it. As you can see here, Janey’s skepticism—even cynicism at times-- gets right in her way throughout the story. And Nean never, ever once thinks before she acts. What you don’t see much of here is Aunt Midge, who is perhaps my favorite character. She is an instigator of mischief and a lover of life and a true friend through and through to all who meet her. She brings out the best in our two main characters, and it’s no spoiler to tell you that she also brings them together in a lasting, powerful friendship.

Also missing on this page—Maine and the wonderful local food my characters are always feasting on. For those morsels, you’ll have to read on…

Learn more about the book and author at the official Kelly Harms website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Strangers"

Jacqueline West is passionate about stories where magic intersects with everyday life—from talking cats, to enchanted eyewear, to paintings as portals to other worlds. A former teacher, occasional musician, and two-time Pushcart nominee for poetry, West lives with her husband and her dog, a Springer Spaniel mix named Brom Bones, amid the bluffs of Red Wing, Minnesota. There she dreams of dusty libraries, secret passageways, and more adventures for her characters in "The Books of Elsewhere" series.

West applied the Page 69 Test to The Books of Elsewhere, Volume Four: The Strangers, and reported the following:

I had my doubts that the Page 69 Test would work for The Strangers in a way that wasn’t either baffling or boring—because in this case, looking at page 69 means not just jumping into the middle of a book, but into the middle of a series. The Strangers is the fourth volume of my middle-grade fantasy series The Books of Elsewhere. Volume One: The Shadows, Volume Two: Spellbound, and Volume Three: The Second Spy were released in 2010, 2011, and 2012, and obviously, a lot of story has piled up inside of them. But aside from the slightly overwhelming number of characters, this page represents the book almost eerily well.

Page 69 has my central players—12-year-old Olive Dunwoody, who lives in a house with a long, magical, and dangerous history, her three talking cats, who keep watch over the house, her friend Rutherford, a know-it-all with magical talents of his own, and her friend Morton, who is actually a living painting (See? Middle of a fantasy series)—venturing into the abandoned house next door. They’re following the lead of an awkward young man named Walter, one of the strangers alluded to in the title. Walter claims he’s there for Olive’s protection, but Olive isn’t sure.

The Strangers, like other volumes in the series, often hinges on the issue of trust. Olive has been a shy, independent, often lonely person. Placing her trust in anyone, even people she knows well, is a struggle for her, and now that she has so many secrets of her own to protect, relying on others is especially risky. But at the same time, her own curiosity—and her need to protect her home and her friends—pushes Olive farther and farther into dangerous territory…

From The Books of Elsewhere, Volume Four: The Strangers:

Dead leaves crackled beneath Olive’s feet as she hurried after him, with Rutherford, Morton, and the cats close behind. They edged around the corner of the house, through a clump of withered hydrangeas, into the shelter of the house’s back wall. Through the nearest windows, Olive spotted a flicker of light—the faint, floating glimmer of a candle gliding through the house’s quiet rooms.

She glanced down at Morton, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching Walter, who had stopped at the back door, with one hand pressed against the wood. Walter’s voice was soft, but Olive caught the stream of words it carried—words from some other language, low and smooth and strange.

“Walter?” she breathed. “What are you doing?”

Walter didn’t answer.

The door creaked open before them. A breath of air drifted out of the darkness inside, cold and smoky with the scent of dust. Somewhere in the depths of the house, the glimmering light bobbed and brightened.

Walter stepped over the threshold.

Morton followed him.

“Morton, wait!” Olive whispered, darting after him through the gaping doorway. The cats brushed against her legs, keeping close. Rutherford hurried behind. “I’m not sure this is wise,” Olive heard him say, before the door banged shut, leaving them all sealed in the dark.

Learn more about the book and author at Jacqueline West's website and the The Books of Elsewhere website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Jacqueline West and Brom Bones.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P."

Adelle Waldman’s writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, the New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, The Village Voice and other publications. She worked as a reporter at the New Haven Register and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and wrote a column for the Wall Street Journal’s website before turning to fiction.

Waldman applied the Page 69 Test to The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., her first novel, and reported the following:

The idea is that page 69 gives a sense of what a book is like, right? I have to say I think my book is either an exception or—equally possible—I have a distorted sense of what my book is like.

To me it seems that page 69 of my book is more descriptive and lyrical than the book is generally. Which isn’t to say that page 69 is very lyrical (it isn’t). But my tone tends to be pretty jokey and wry, even though the book is also, I think, sympathetic to the characters. I don’t tend to do many descriptions of nature or scenery, and I don’t use many metaphors, unless they are intended to be comic, like this one, “Bad service was a source of great frustration for her, an irritant that might at any moment set her off, like science was for the medieval church.” (That’s from page 80.)

On page 69, my main character is on a date that is going well—he is beginning to feel something earnest and sincere. That’s perhaps why the tone is a little different. I didn’t want to undermine the romantic tension. The page even contains a description of scenery: “Nate turned to take in the Manhattan skyline behind them. The chains of white lights lining the cables of the other East River bridges were like dangling necklaces beneath the other brightly lit towers, a fireworks display frozen at its most expansive moment.”

But the next line is probably more typical of the book’s tone: “The view, familiar and yet still—always—thrilling, in combination with the plastic smell of the taxi, made him feel almost giddy. He had a sort of Pavlovian reaction to cabs. He rarely took them except on his way to bed with a new girl.”

From Page 69:

“I want to see your book collection,” he said instead.

“Gag me.”

“I’m taking that as a yes.”

The cab he hailed seemed to move like a bumper car on the shimmering street, spewing water as it slid to a halt about twenty feet in front of them. They ran toward it, laughing drunkenly as they scrambled into the backseat. The small, balding driver grumbled when they told him they were going to Brooklyn and, speaking fiercely into his cell phone in a South Asian language, banged a fist against his doily-covered steering wheel. This also struck them as extremely funny.

Crossing the bridge, Nate turned to take in the Manhattan skyline behind them. The chains of white lights lining the cables of the other East River bridges were like dangling necklaces beneath the brightly lit towers, a fireworks display frozen at its most expansive moment. The view, familiar and yet still—always—thrilling, in combination with the plastic smell of the taxi, made him feel almost giddy. He had sort of a Pavlovian reaction to cabs. He rarely took them except on his way to bed with a new girl.

Hannah’s apartment was right off Myrtle, on the second floor of a walk-up building. She circled the edges, switching on a succession of small lamps. The space lit up only gradually, as she got to the third or fourth one. The wood floors were scuffed, but the walls were a very clean, stark white with original moldings at the top and very few pictures on them. One wall was lined with bookshelves. On the other side, a half-wall separated the kitchen from the living area. The room seemed unusually spacious for New York, in part because it had relatively little furniture. There was, Nate noticed, no couch. No television, either.

She gestured for Nate to sit near the window where two mismatched, upholstered chairs sat on either side of a small, triangular table. On the windowsill sat an ashtray.

Learn more about the book and author at Adelle Waldman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Repeat Year"

Andrea Lochen earned her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. While there, she won a Hopwood Novel Award for a draft of The Repeat Year, her first novel. She currently lives in suburban Milwaukee with her husband and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha.

Lochen applied the Page 69 Test to The Repeat Year and reported the following:

This page captures an important turning point in the novel—when Olive realizes she isn’t the only one reliving the year; her mom’s friend, Sherry Witan is an experienced “repeater” and a possible mentor for her in this strange time travel. Sherry is a socially awkward, brutally blunt character (who was a ton of fun to write!), and instead of giving satisfying answers to Olive’s questions about how a repeat year works, she seems to raise even more questions.

In this section, Olive also starts to fathom the true potential she has to fix last year’s mistakes and rewrite history. Her thoughts immediately turn to her ex-boyfriend, Phil, the man she once thought she would marry. The two were torn apart last year after a serious betrayal, but Phil has no memory of these events. Can Olive save their relationship the second time around?

“For heaven’s sake,” Sherry said, but her voice was kind, motherly. She handed Olive a handkerchief that smelled of men’s cologne. “You’re doing all right. You’re handling this quite well, actually. My first January like this, I spent in bed. I didn’t shower, I didn’t dress, I barely ate. By the end of the month, I was getting out of bed, but only to bring back books from the library. I read books on Buddhism, Hinduism, existentialism. I read Hawking, McTaggart, Kant, Leibniz, the ancient Greeks. I read H.G. Wells’s goddamn Time Machine. And none of it helped. If anything, it made things worse, because I became confused, paralyzed, too scared to try anything. I went back to bed for another month, and I didn’t snap out of it until my husband started talking about Gene McGregor.”

Olive felt humbled. A part of her had always secretly admired the complete abandon with which some people could break down and wallow in their misfortune. Whenever Kerrigan broke up with a boyfriend, she called in sick to work and camped out on the couch for several days watching the Soap Network and eating canned pineapple. But Olive liked to be clean and eat regular meals and keep busy. Moving forward as though nothing had happened was her preferred method of coping.

The fact that it hadn’t occurred to her to look in a book for the answers made her feel dimwitted. She knew who Stephen Hawking was but couldn’t imagine wading through one of his scientific texts. The other names Sherry listed were only vaguely familiar to her.

But what struck her the most was that Sherry had assumed she was weeping out of exhaustion and frustration from the overwhelming prospect of reliving the year, which had blissfully, fleetingly left Olive’s mind for a moment. She had been crying for Phil: the way she had hurt him and her disappointment over how things had turned out for them.

Learn more about the book and author at Andrea Lochen's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Andrea Lochen.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Contaminated"

Em Garner began writing at a very young age, always preferring the stories about what goes bump in the night. An avid reader of horror, science-fiction and fantasy, she first turned her hand to short stories about the sorts of things that hide under the bed…and she kept right on going.

Garner applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Contaminated,  and reported the following:

From Page 69:

My dad had gone to work. My mom, too. Opal and I were home alone. I was sleeping in to enjoy the first days of summer break. The house was quiet, until I heard the neighbors’ dogs barking. They barked a lot, but not like this. Not for so long or so loud. I got up, went downstairs. Opal was at the table eating cereal in milk and reading a book. She heard the dogs, too.

I still thought nothing of it until the dogs, two of them from next door, ran up onto our back deck. Snapping and biting, they paced in front of the sliding glass doors, tails tucked between their legs. They were begging to get in – something they’d never done, even when they came over to crap in our yard. Our neighbors’ dogs were Rottweilers, by the way. Nice dogs, but not timid. They’d run off a meter reader or two before our neighbor got an electric collar for them. It hadn’t stopped them from running over here.

“What’s going on with Tooty and Frooty?” Opal asked me.

Before I could answer, Craig from next door staggered onto the deck. He was wearing a bathing suit, which wasn’t that unusual since they’d put in a pool the year before, and it was hot out. The staggering wasn’t that surprising either, since if he was out by the pool he usually had a couple of beers, too. What did make both of us cry out and back up was the way he staggered into the glass door.

Full on, his head smacked the glass so hard it starred. Bright red blood showed up on his forehead and started streaming down his face. His mouth worked like he was shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything but the barking. The dogs circled his feet, dodging his kicks.

Craig never hit his dogs. They were as much his children as his real kids were. Maybe more, since the dogs usually obeyed him, and his kids mostly didn’t. His dogs were allowed to sleep on his bed with him. They rode in his truck with him. And now he was kicking at them, screaming so loud the veins stood out on his bloody face.

Page 69 is a great representation of Contaminated’s story – real, normal life interrupted by the total dissolving of society. Craig has lost his mind, launching an attack first on his beloved dogs. Then on Velvet and her younger sister Opal. His madness is echoed in the rest of the world, where thousands of people have become brutally violent, rioting, looting and generally going insane. Craig’s attack is only the beginning of events that will turn the world upside down and inside out, leaving it forever changed.

Learn more about the book and author at Em Garner's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wednesday Daughters"

Meg Waite Clayton is the nationally bestselling author of The Four Ms. Bradwells, The Wednesday Sisters, and The Language of Light—all national book club picks.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Wednesday Daughters, her latest novel, and reported the following:

The flap copy of The Wednesday Daughters, a sequel of sorts to my New York Times bestseller, The Wednesday Sisters, describes it as a novel about “mothers and daughters, best friends who become family, and secrets and dreams passed down through generations.” Much to my delight, page 69 bears this out!

The mothers in the novel are the Wednesday “Sisters” (actually friends) of the prior novel, but The Wednesday Daughters is a stand-alone novel; readers don’t have to read The Wednesday Sisters to make sense of the new book. In the new novel, three friends—ranging in age from late 30s to early 50s—travel together to a writing cottage in the beautiful English Lake District. They are searching for answers about one of their mothers, and about themselves.

Page 69 marks the end of a chapter in which one of the daughters, Anna Page, finds herself lost in a woods on Lake Windermere—which is said to be haunted by the Crier of Claife—just as darkness falls. The passage is evocative of the English setting, although here it looms scary and dark where for much of the book it is the more lovely setting you find rendered by The Tale of Peter Rabbit author Beatrix Potter (who appears as a character of sorts in the novel) and the poet William Wordsworth, both of whom made this area their homes and wrote about it. Let’s just say that you can’t smell scones cooking in this scene.

It’s also one of the few scenes in the novel in which a character appears alone.

The scene is very much a metaphor for what all three friends are experiencing. Hope, Julie, and Anna Page are lost in some way, just as Anna Page is literally lost here. All three are trapped between difficult choices, just as Anna Page is trapped between what appears to be a poisonous snake on the path going one way, and an unidentifiable shadow in the other direction. All three are examining the turns they’ve made in life just as Anna Page is examining the turns she’s made on the path home, and wondering if they have gone the wrong way.

Will it give away too much to say that the last sentences of the opening paragraphs of the novel read “We are, in the Wednesday Circle, our mother’s daughters … And this is our story, which is, I suppose, a love story. Or two. Or, actually, probably four.”—and that this scene marks a precursor to one of those love stories?

Here it is:

Why had her mother spent all those years holding on to something that never was? Was that motherhood? Sacrificing your own happiness for the illusion of a normal home?

The stone wall [Anna Page had] followed uphill was nowhere in sight, and the path before her forked where she could see it wouldn’t have seemed to from the other direction. She’d have had to look back to the left to see the merging path. Or to the right? One of those funny path drains slanted away at her feet beyond the split on one side. She’d stepped over one, but was it this one? She stepped onto the path without the slanted drain and looked back at the tree with the funny curving split, trying to remember whether this was the angle from which she’d first seen it.

She started paying attention then. The light was fading fast, the air thick with the smell of dead leaves and moss and wood. The quiet of her feet on the soggy leaves and the slippery stone met the occasional scamper of a red squirrel, or a deer, perhaps. Wild boar used to inhabit these woods, Graham had said, but no longer did. Of course, cougars didn’t patrol the streets of Palo Alto, and yet one ended up in a tree on Walnut Drive. The poor creature hadn’t done a thing to anyone, but he’d been shot dead.

Anna Page came to another fork, both paths leading downhill, which should be toward the lake. She took the wider one, thinking surely the path she’d come up hadn’t narrowed as much as the other. When the path forked a third time, both paths heading uphill, she knew she’d taken the wrong fork at the funny tree. And it was getting so dark so quickly.

She was making her way on the slippery rock path, reconsidering this direction, when she heard something. Where her footfalls would have landed, she could just make out a long stretch of what might be wavy gray-red diamond. She backed away slowly, trying to calm the rush of blood through her pulmonary artery, where she might bleed to death in a very few heartbeats were it ever compromised. When she thought she was far enough, she turned to run, only to see a shadow of a figure ahead.

Learn more about the book and author at Meg Waite Clayton's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Downfall"

Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling author of Adrenaline, The Last Minute, and the newly released Downfall. All three books feature Sam Capra, former CIA agent turned owner of bars around the world.

Abbott applied the Page 69 Test to Downfall and reported the following:

From Page 69:

Just like his brother, he looked confused, surprised. Life can end in a snap; we wrap ourselves in all sorts of blankets to hide that cruel fact.

Page 69 in Downfall is a very representative page for this Faustian thriller. In it, former CIA agent Sam Capra has already killed a man named Rostov in self-defense in his San Francisco bar. Fearful that an enemy from his spying days has pursued him into his new life, he's stolen Rostov's driver's license before the police see it and has come to the man's apartment to find out why he attacked Sam. But instead he's found a dangerous man already there, going through his attacker's apartment, and an innocent person-Rostov's brother--arrives at the apartment in the middle of their confrontation. In a way it's a perfect microcosm of Downfall. Sam is up against a powerful enemy who thinks nothing of destroying a stranger for his own benefit, and Sam is entirely concerned with saving an innocent stranger--even if earlier in the evening, he's killed the man's own brother.

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

The Page 69 Test: Trust Me.

The Page 69 Test: Adrenaline.

Writers Read: Jeff Abbott (July 2011).

Writers Read: Jeff Abbott (August 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fort"

Born in Ithaca, New York, Aric Davis has lived most his life in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the author of A Good and Useful Hurt and the acclaimed YA novel Nickel Plated, called by Gillian Flynn a “dark but humane, chilling and sometimes heart-breaking work of noir” and given a “Top 10” Booklist designation in 2011. A punk-music and tattoo aficionado, Davis has been a professional body piercer for sixteen years.

Davis applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Fort, and reported the following:

The Page 69 Test--shockingly--turned out far better in my book, The Fort, then I ever would have guessed. Page 69 has it all, a girl running for freedom her from the man who took it away in the first place. In my page 69, the book starts to change, and the events promised on the back page or the description on your Kindle begin to come clear. Page 69 is far from the middle of The Fort but it is definitely the turning point.

Reading it over again is actually sort of surreal, after all, this is my new book for readers, the book I’m looking at was five manuscripts ago. It’s not every time that a writer looks back on their own work with anything besides derision, but in this case I think I’m clean. The page reads like something that someone I sort of know might have written, much like seeing an old friend in a crowd. It’s only been a year since I wrote The Fort but it was still a pleasant surprise to find myself interested in the story, even though of course I know what happens next. I sure hope that my readers feel the same way.

Learn more about the book and author at the official Aric Davis website.

--Marshal Zeringue