She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Vivian Rising, and reported the following:Vivian Rising is a novel of self-discovery and healing, in which a young woman mourning the grandmother who raised her hunts down her lost faith to find a way out of grief…and stumbles upon it in a most unlikely spot. As the prickly, perceptive astrologer Kavia leads Viv to process her grief and rebalance her life, Viv’s faced with what amounts to the same question she’s been avoiding her whole life: should she continue along the safe path destiny’s led her to, or finally trust herself to step out and write her own story?Learn more about Vivian Rising at Daniella Brodsky's website.
Page 69 opens with an epigraph that certainly illuminates one of the book’s core themes: change of any kind—painful as it may be—often casts the world in a whole new light, not only for us, but for others around us, too. You never know what event is going to shake up your world, but you can be certain of one thing: our individual histories make us who we are. It’s up to us what we do with that experience. The scene that unfolds on 69 is a light break from some heavy stuff that comes before. Still, its style and painting of the unique Brooklyn setting are consistent with the balance of the book. A careful reader could certainly pick up what’s going on here by some key words in the scene, but you probably wouldn’t get the sense that there’s an intriguing guy named Len next door with whom Viv just might partake in some (ahem) uncharacteristic, escapist behavior! It’s certainly one way to answer the question that all of us ask when we lose someone we love: "now what?"
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--Marshal Zeringue