"One Level Down"

Mary G. Thompson is the author of The Word, Flicker and Mist, and other novels for children and young adults, as well as the new sci-fi novella One Level Down. Her contemporary thriller Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee was a winner of the 2017 Westchester Fiction Award and a finalist for the 2018-2019 Missouri Gateway award. Her short fiction has appeared in Dark Matter Magazine, Apex Magazine, and others. Thompson is originally from Eugene, Oregon, where she attended the University of Oregon School of Law. She practiced law for seven years, including five years in the US Navy JAGC, and now works as a law librarian. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children from The New School and completed the UCLA School of Theater, Film & Television's Professional Program in Screenwriting. She lives in Washington, DC.

Thompson applied the Page 69 Test to One Level Down and reported the following:

Since this is a novella and the text is only 158 pages long, page 69 is a decent way into the book. Here we have Ella, who is fifty-eight but being forced by Daddy to look and act as if she’s five, finally meeting the Technician who came from outside. Now she’s realizing how difficult her plan for escape is going to be to execute:

I know I’ll never get Niclaus alone at the party. After we leave this house, he’ll be pulled in a million directions. He’ll exit our universe, fix our glitches, and never be seen again. And my next chance won't come for another sixty years. I’ve spent a thousand hours thinking about what I’d do in this moment. Now that it’s here, I realize how stupid my plan is. It’s not a plan really, it’s just a hope.

“Sounds like fun,” Niclaus says as they disappear into Daddy’s office and Daddy closes the door in front of me. I don’t go to my room, though. I go to the living room and pace around. I circle and circle and circle, and I know that with every moment I’m acting less like a child. I’m letting my entire facade, and everything I need to survive, fall apart because this moment is too important and too quick, and I have to hang on.

This page does a pretty good job of telling you what the story is about. You learn that this is a simulated universe, what the technician is there to do, and that Ella is trapped and needs his help. You also get a sense of Ella’s desperation. Also on this page, we see her thinking of her deleted stepmother and leaping back into the act of pretending she’s a five-year-old.

“I’m going to build a spaceship,” I say, pretending like I’ve understood nothing. “Daddy says we have lots of planets out there just like you do.”

One thing I tried to convey is that even though Ella is trapped in a terrible situation, there are positive things about their universe. If you weren’t under Daddy’s thumb, you could appreciate the beautiful nature and the potential for building up a society. There’s a tremendous amount of lost potential when we hold people back to suit our own interests, and a lot of promise in allowing our children to explore. And ultimately, you often can’t hold others back no matter how much you want to. Ella is determined to find a way out, whether it’s via the Technician or other means. She knows she deserves to be able to go out into the world and build spaceships instead of being trapped in one man’s house. I hope readers will root for her to get what she needs.

Visit Mary G. Thompson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Amy Chelsea Stacie Dee.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Four Queens of Crime"

Rosanne Limoncelli is an author, filmmaker, and storyteller living in Brooklyn. She has written, directed, and produced short narrative films, documentaries, and educational films. Limoncelli also writes plays, feature scripts, poetry, games, mysteries, and science fiction. Her short fiction has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Suspense Magazine, and Noir Nation, and her short films have been screened in festivals around the world.

Limoncelli applied the Page 69 Test to her debut mystery novel, The Four Queens of Crime, and reported the following:

From page 69:

The two beautiful young women had danced a quick-paced, swinging sort of dance, laughing with joy, their eyes only for each other. The song ended and they hugged, catching their breath. The next tune was a slow romantic ballad and the embrace turned into a slow dance. Kate and Sofia seemed completely lost in the music and the rhythm. Dorothy couldn’t take her eyes off them. Suddenly, Sir Henry had stormed onto the dance floor and pulled them apart.

He had grabbed Kate’s arm, his mouth close to her ear, saying something low and harsh. Kate’s face had turned red, her fists clenched in anger. Sir Henry’s hand twisted her arm as he held it tightly. Then he had marched her to the buffet, Sofia following behind them in confusion.

Remembering it now, Dorothy felt her own face flush. Being reprimanded in public by your father was not something a young person felt lightly, which she knew from firsthand experience. She had loved her own father, and revered his reputation and intellect. But there had been times when his Victorian sensibility had made her heart ache. Going away to school, and the friendships she made with the other girls there, had been liberating. She looked at Kate and Sofia near her at the dining table—it was obvious they meant a lot to each other.

“Cara mia,” Sofia was saying to Kate. “Non ti preoccupare. Io sono qui.”

Dorothy was fluent in Italian and knew that she had said, ‘My dear, don’t worry, I am here.’ Kate was still weeping softly, on and off, Sofia stroked her hair and squeezed her hand. Dorothy wondered what exactly Kate’s father had said to her as he pulled her off the dance floor. Perhaps he thought the girls were a little too close. After all, they weren’t children any longer, they were young ladies, and it was a very public event. Whatever he had said, it now would linger in Kate’s heart as her last interaction with her father. Unless they had had another meeting or confrontation later in the night? Tears could stem from sorrow, Dorothy thought, but also from guilt or fear.

Whether the reader checks the blurb on the back of the book or not, I am surprised to discover that I think page 69 would help the reader jump right into the story without being confusing. Important characters make an appearance, and the interactions between them are good clues to possible suspects in the murder, and this small piece of the story gives an insight to an important theme in the novel. The dancing of two teenage girls at a fancy gala ball has enraged one girl’s father. What was really happening between the two girls? What made the father so angry? The incident was witnessed by Dorothy L Sayers, one of the famous authors (Queens of Crime) hosting the ball, and she connects it to a memory of her youth. This gives her an emotional reaction to the incident, which brings on thoughts and suspicions. The scene is a good example of what the book is like, a queen of crime observing people, their actions and reactions, and how the information may relate to the death of the victim. The thought process that pushes the plot forward and asks the reader do their own investigation to help figure out the end. Another insight on page 69 is that even though this story takes place in 1938, it could just as well have happened today. That’s another important aspect to the story; the political and philosophical parallels from 1938 to now.

Visit Rosanne Limoncelli's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Four Queens of Crime.

--Marshal Zeringue

"White Line Fever"

KC Jones is a screenwriter-turned-novelist currently living in western Washington. When not writing, he can be found watching movies, playing video and board games, or enjoying nature—whenever it isn’t raining.

He graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas with a degree in film production. His first published novel, Black Tide, was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a first novel.

Jones applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, White Line Fever, and reported the following:

Page 69 of White Line Fever is the title page for Part 2. Maybe not the greatest indicator of what's in the rest of the book. But at the same time, the design team chose art for these breaks that slowly shift to reveal a full picture over the course of the story. On page 69, we see a night sky entirely unpolluted by city lights, so that the galaxy is clearly visible. Underneath that, a black, lightless forest silhouetted against the nightscape, the trees blurred slightly from the apparent motion of the viewer. In the foreground, a road is just hinted at, also blurred by the viewer’s speedy passing through this place. It's an eerie shot, even without context. It suggests being chased, or moving quickly toward somewhere else. It hints of a road trip gone awry, a spooky forest, and cosmic horror, which sums up the vibes of this book pretty well. It’s at least probably enough to get a browser to turn the page, which is a much better sampling of things to come, as the main character notes the strangeness of the woods and the road as she and her friends drive through it, before her head smacks the window glass and shocks her out of the highway hypnosis-induced trance she hadn’t even realized came over her. It's just the first time that this road is going to get into her head, and things are only going to get worse for the four friends from here. This road is only fifteen miles long, but it's going to take these characters to places they hoped never to go again.

Visit KC Jones's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Beauty of the End"

Lauren Stienstra is an American novelist who enjoys writing about the intersection of duty, science, and humanity. She believes that fiction can encourage readers to re-think their roles, responsibilities, and relationships in our own present world.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Stienstra now lives, works, and writes around Washington, D.C. She holds advanced degrees in science and public policy from the George Washington and Johns Hopkins universities, and trained in creative writing at UCLA.

Stienstra applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Beauty of the End, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Three birds, one stone. By joining the Mendelia, I’d get to leave Hawley. I’d get to stay with my sister. I’d surrender my ovaries and everyone would stop bothering me about kids.

It was almost too good to be true.

“There’s just one last thing,” I said. “What are we going to tell Mom?”

Albeit brief, this page offers a great summary of The Beauty of the End up to page 69, and also hints at the forthcoming tension. A reader skipping to this page will be left with several pressing questions—one of which is particularly chilling. What is the Mendelia? (It should carry an ominous undertone.) Why does the narrator want to leave Hawley? And most perplexingly, why does she think surrendering her ovaries is a good thing? The answers to these three questions are central to my main character’s motivation, and they are all tidily encapsulated here.

As far as the unfolding drama, it’s clear the main character is speaking to someone—but who? Based on the weight of internal dialogue, the reader will likely (and correctly) suspect that the conversational partner is someone significant. Then comes the reveal: they share a mother. Even more intriguingly, they are conspiring to keep something from her. One of these siblings has an something to hide—a major plot point in the book.

From this short excerpt, the reader will probably surmise that there is something sinister afoot. While the opening chapters gradually build this atmosphere, this passage distills it quite effectively. The only missing piece is a direct reference to the precipitating crisis—the discovery of the species-ending genetic flaw.

Visit Lauren Stienstra's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Beauty of the End.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Immortal Woman"

Su Chang is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors’ Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, among others.

Chang applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, The Immortal Woman, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my book is distinctively different from most other pages in that it recounts, in a satirical and brisk manner, a series of factual occurrences at the end of the Cultural Revolution (the downfall of the Gang of Four and Mao’s handpicked heir, and the rise of President Deng Xiaoping). This page might have been the most non-fictional of the entire novel! As such, I’m afraid the Page 69 Test doesn’t quite apply to my book. The page serves as a bridge between two narrative scenes. I’m much more interested in the human story than recounting history. Browsing this page alone wouldn’t tell the reader much about the book, other than the fact that part of it is set in the 1970s China. However, I think history buffs would find it intriguing. And even for those who didn’t pick up the book for its history, I hope I’ve found an entertaining and humorous way to compress a period of complex history into one single page and to set the stage for the ensuing human drama.

Learn more about the book and author at Su Chang's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Immortal Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"I Am the Swarm"

Hayley Chewins is the critically acclaimed author of The Turnaway Girls and The Sisters of Straygarden Place. She grew up in Cape Town, and now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her husband and daughter. She is the singer and songwriter for the alt-pop band Eight Thousand Birds.

Chewins applied the Page 69 Test to her YA debut, I Am the Swarm, and reported the following:

Page 69 of I Am the Swarm contains the following poem:

“Did something happen? With Mamma?”

Dad shakes his head.

Meaning: Having you looked around lately?

Meaning: Where have you been these past few months?

Meaning: Don’t ask me to tell you. Don’t ask me to say it out loud.

If you were browsing in a bookshop and you opened my book to page 69, you’d get a good idea of the style of the prose. The spareness of Nell’s voice is evident here, and so is the use of white space. Quite a lot to get from 39 words!

What page 69 leaves out, though, is the strange, irrational magic that the book contains, which is a huge part of the story. So I’d say the test is partly successful, but the reader might be surprised a few pages later when Nell’s mother is suddenly seventeen again, or when Nell herself wakes up after a nightmare to find her bedroom floor sticky with black beetles.

What page 69 does really well, though, is give the reader of sense of all the silence in the book. I Am the Swarm is, in part, a story about all the things we can’t say to one another, and page 69 is a good example of that theme coming through.

Visit Hayley Chewins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bitterfrost"

Bryan Gruley is the Edgar-nominated author of six novels – Purgatory Bay, Bleak Harbor, the Starvation Lake Trilogy, and his most recent, Bitterfrost - and one award-winning work of nonfiction. A lifelong journalist, he shared in The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He lives in northern lower Michigan with his wife, Pamela, where he can be found playing hockey, singing in his band, or spending time with his children and grandchildren.

Gruley applied the Page 69 Test to Bitterfrost and reported the following:

Page 69 of Bitterfrost finds us in the home of the protagonist, Jimmy Baker, as he’s being visited by police detective Garth Klimmek. Some hours earlier, police had found the body of a man beaten to death. Klimmek is here because the house was visible from the scene of the crime; he thought the occupant might have seen something. The detective had actually stopped by earlier, when Jimmy wasn’t home, and saw some things that made him even more curious. As Klimmek is asking Jimmy about the night before, Bitterfrost police officer Paul Sylvester arrives with some important information.

The page is a nice microcosm of the novel because it embodies a central tension: Jimmy’s violent past and his difficulty remembering what happened the night before, when he came upon the now-dead man and his friend at a local bar. Klimmek treads lightly, asking simple questions in a friendly way, playing the proverbial good cop. At the same time, the detective has in the past day researched Jimmy’s troubling history: “In (Klimmek’s) line of work, he’d encountered plenty of people … capable of inflicting lethal violence using nothing but their hands. But he had to wonder how this hometown hero, the second child in a seemingly normal Bitterfrost family, had become such a brute.”

When Klimmek steps outside to speak with Officer Paul Sylvester, he hears—though Jimmy does not—that an anonymous caller who heard about the killing on the news has alerted police that “a couple of Detroit guys were raising hell at the Lost Loon last night, might have run into trouble.” By now the reader knows Jimmy was at the Loon, where he ran into two Detroit guys and decided afterward that he might not go directly home. Combined with Jimmy’s faulty memory, the scene heightens the reader’s suspicions of Jimmy’s culpability. The scene hints at the questions that will run through the reader’s mind throughout Bitterfrost: Could Jimmy have done it? Did Jimmy do it? Why doesn’t he remember anything that might acquit him? Is he simply lying?

Answers are provided a couple of hundred pages later.

Learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Starvation Lake.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Tree.

The Page 69 Test: Bleak Harbor.

The Page 69 Test: Purgatory Bay.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Falls to Pieces"

Douglas Corleone is the international bestselling author of Gone Cold, Payoff, and Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Equation, as well as the acclaimed Kevin Corvelli novels, the Simon Fisk international thrillers, and the stand-alone courtroom drama The Rough Cut. Corleone’s debut novel, One Man’s Paradise, won the 2009 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A former New York City criminal defense attorney, Corleone now resides in Honolulu, where he is currently at work on his next novel.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Falls to Pieces, and reported the following:

In the ARC (Advance Reader’s Copy) of Falls to Pieces, page 69 contains only five lines since it ends a chapter. I thought I’d be writing about how the novel fails the test, but when I read the page, I realized it passes.

The scene takes place in a lava tube (a natural cave formed by lava) just off the hiking trail at a Maui National Park, where Kati’s fiancé Eddie has gone missing. Kati and her fiancé’s law partner Noah are searching for a missing walking stick, which may hold the key to Eddie’s disappearance.

The page brings a satisfying conclusion to the suspense built up in the chapter, which would give a new reader a fair idea of the story. These few lines also raise a startling new question, urging the reader to ignore the clock and read one more chapter.

(Actually, the next chapter is in Kati’s daughter Zoe’s point of view, so readers are just going to have to read two. Tomorrow morning, we’ll all just need to grab an extra cup of coffee.)

Learn more about the book and author at Douglas Corleone's website.

The Page 69 Test: Good as Gone.

My Book, The Movie: Payoff.

The Page 69 Test: Gone Cold.

My Book, The Movie: Gone Cold.

Writers Read: Douglas Corleone (August 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne"

Ron Currie is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories. He has won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and has developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America. He lives in Portland, Maine and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program.

Currie applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne introduces readers to the character of The Man, a ghoul in the tradition of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. The Man is on his way to Waterville, Maine, where he intends to confront the novel's heroine, Babs Dionne, and take away the drug business she's been running for the last thirty years:

Not, understand, that The Man was in any hurry. In point of fact, he never hurried, even when going extremely fast. He did not experience urgency the way normal people experienced urgency. His pulse rarely rose above sixty (forty if he was sitting still). He'd never had a need for antiperspirant. Not once in his life had he suffered the stress-induced cortisol hangover that characterized modern life for most people. Perhaps this was genetic. Whatever the reason, his autonomic nervous system remained dark and dormant in any situation when the average person's would be screaming five alarms, pulling every hormonal and cardiovascular lever to prepare the body for mortal threat real or imagined. It just didn't register for him, and never had. He could recognize stress or peril intellectually, but his body refused to respond. Not only did this explain the fact that he was capable of only one mood--namely, cheerful impassiveness--but it also made The Man 100 percent indifferent to the fear and pain and hopes of other people.

This is an excellent representation of the whole of the novel: spooky, funny in a cockeyed kind of way, and also menacing and deadly serious all at once.

Unfortunately page 69 doesn't cover The Man's backstory, which follows immediately after and shows us how he came to understand his calling as a cartel enforcer. Oddly enough, he was in cosmetology school at the time, training to be a hairdresser, and he experienced something, while learning the fine art of straight-shaving, that clued him in to the fact that he was well-suited for the kind of work he does when we meet him.

Learn more about the book and author at Ron Currie's website.

The Page 69 Test: God Is Dead.

My Book, The Movie: God Is Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Matters!.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ends of Things"

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, created by Oscar-winning writer Tom McCarthy and starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Chwialkowska holds a BA in literature from Yale.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Ends of Things, her first novel, and reported the following:

On page 69 of the paperback, Laura describes her former best friend Chloe’s curated social media presence, and this touches on one of my novel’s key themes—appearance vs reality. The novel is concerned with how things look vs how things really are, what we think we are supposed to want from life vs what we really want. Social media allows Chloe to present an image of herself that is inauthentic, and this foments in Laura a lot of anxiety. When Laura learns that Diana, the solo female traveler that she becomes obsessed with, has no social media presence at all, it underscores Laura’s internal struggle—the yearning to abide by social norms in order to belong (like Chloe) vs the desire to step outside of those norms and be unconstrained and free (like Diana).

Visit Sandra Chwialkowska's website.

Q&A with Sandra Chwialkowska.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Mailman"

Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a son of the Finger Lakes and now longtime Ohio resident, is the Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers-award nominated author of 10 mystery novels and two nonfiction books, and editor of a short-story anthology

His latest novel, The Mailman, is a Library Journal pick of the month. Publishers Weekly said of the thriller: “With full-throttle pacing from start to finish, this will have Jack Reacher fans hoping Carter is back in action soon.”

Welsh-Huggins applied the Page 69 Test to The Mailman and reported the following:

For The Mailman, the Page 69 Test locates the narrative in media res with suggestions of secrets being kept and hints of drama to come.

The top of the page finds my protagonist, freelance courier Mercury Carter, quizzing Glenn Vaughn, a passenger in Carter’s Chevy Suburban, about Glenn’s work for Xeneconn, an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company. Xeneconn has been in the news lately as it works on medication to treat addiction. Carter is struck by Glenn’s reluctance bordering on hostility to discuss his work.

Glenn interrupts Carter and asks him to clarify something Glenn overheard Carter say in a phone conversation a minute earlier about Chicago. Carter confirms the city is their destination and Glenn appears to suffer a panic attack. Glenn reveals that his teenage daughter, Abby, attends a private boarding school in Chicago.

“What if they…?” Glenn says as the page ends.

The backdrop for this conversation took place less than two hours earlier when Carter interrupted a home invasion at the suburban Indianapolis house that Glenn, an attorney, shares with his wife, Rachel Stanfield, also an attorney. In the seconds before Carter rang the doorbell with a delivery for Rachel, a four-person team led by an uncompromising brute called Finn was on the cusp of torturing Glenn and Rachel to pry information from them about a woman Rachel’s firm is in litigation with.

As Rachel begs for their lives, telling Finn she’s divulged all the information she has, Glenn blurts out that he has millions of dollars he can give the men. The revelation shocks Rachel even in the depths of her fear.

Carter has never missed a delivery and will do just about anything to keep that streak alive, a motto he unleashes when he realizes what’s going on inside Rachel and Glenn’s house, to the detriment of Finn and his gang. Despite Carter’s best efforts, however, Finn and company escape with Rachel as a hostage and head to Chicago. Unbeknownst to them, Carter—with Glenn in tow—is in close pursuit.

The plot of The Mailman is transparent from the start: can Carter rescue Rachel in time? Page 69 reveals layers of that dilemma and raises questions about how well Rachel and Glenn know each other, with their lives and their daughter’s life at stake.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave.

Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (April 2023).

My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Road.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (November 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Sick to Death.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Map to Paradise"

Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling novelist with more than a million books in readers’ hands and in eighteen languages. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning works of historical fiction have been named to numerous lists including Publishers Weekly’s annual roster of 100 best books, Library Reads Top Picks, Real Simple's annual tally of best books, Booklist’s Top Ten, Book of the Month, and Amazon Editors’ Pick. Her newest title is A Map to Paradise, a novel about belonging, friendship, and finding one’s way home, and is set in California during the early and scary years of the Cold War. Susan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and yellow Lab, Winston.

Meissner applied the Page 69 Test to A Map to Paradise and came up with following:

From page 69:

“For heaven’s sake,” Melanie said in an exasperated voice. “Elwood is not some kind of madman who can’t handle seeing a stranger! He just doesn’t go outside. And it’s not a disturbance to ask someone if there’s anything you can do for them.”

So on the fourth afternoon, and while June was sitting on the couch with pages of Elwood’s current screenplay to proofread, Eva did attempt to make contact from the hall side of his bedroom door, behind which she heard the sound of a radio playing and the whirring of an oscillating fan. She tapped on the door as lightly as she could and said softly, “Mr. Blankenship? Is there anything I can get for you? Mr. Blankenship?”

There’d been no answer.

With a trembling hand and a whispered prayer she’d tried the doorknob. It would not turn.

In this little snippet from A Map to Paradise, Melanie Cole, a blacklisted actress hiding out in 1956 Malibu, is worried about the agoraphobic screenwriter who lives next door. She hasn’t seen Elwood in a while and she’s worried that June Blankenship, his sister-in-law and live-in caregiver, isn’t being truthful when Melanie asks about him. Melanie has tasked her housekeeper, an Eastern European immigrant named Eva Kruse who lost everything and everyone in WW2, to find out if Elwood is okay. Eva has the means to do it as Melanie has loaned her housekeeper to June for a little while June recovers from a strained back. We see in this scene on page 69 that Eva is unable to do what Melanie has directed her to do—which is make sure Elwood is all right.

This scene is not exactly pivotal to the story’s overall takeaway, but it is absolutely essential to understanding what will compel these three women to become allies to each other. They have nothing in common except the loss or imminent loss of all that defines them, all that makes them feel safe and secure and believing they are right where they belong.

This is a story about three women all facing some kind of displacement. Melanie the actress has been caught up in the Red Scare that was rampant in Hollywood in the 1950s and she’s been ousted from the only career she’s ever wanted. Eva the housekeeper is one of the eleven million Displaced Persons made homeless by World War 2 and she has also lied on her immigration papers. She is pretending to be Polish, when in fact she was born in Russia. And June stands to lose her home, her livelihood and the man she secretly loves if he dies. And he’s not well.

It's a story that explores what a person will do to get back what was taken from them or prevent it from being taken in the first place. It’s about imagining there could be a map that will lead you back to what you once had.

If only it were that easy.

Visit Susan Meissner's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Susan Meissner & Bella.

My Book, The Movie: Stars Over Sunset Boulevard.

My Book, The Movie: A Bridge Across the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: A Bridge Across the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Year of the War.

The Page 69 Test: Only the Beautiful.

--Marshal Zeringue