Saturday, June 16, 2012

"The Year of the Gadfly"

Jennifer Miller is author of The Year of the Gadfly (Harcourt, 2012) and Inheriting The Holy Land (Ballantine, 2005). Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, Marie Claire, Allure, Salon.com, and The Daily Beast.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Year of the Gadfly and reported the following:
Page 69 of The Year of the Gadfly, is a terrific microcosm of the novel. It encapsulates the themes of secrecy and moral ambiguity that pervade the book and hints at the whirling, action-oriented plot. The page is written from the first-person perspective of Iris Dupont, a 14-year-old aspiring journalist, whose only friend is the ghost of Edward R. Murrow. In this particular moment, Iris is reeling from recent events at her high power prep school, including a flash mob, in which a cafeteria-full of students gang up on one of their peers and a science class exercise based on the shock experiments of Yale psychologist Stanley Milgrim. Iris is in the process of investigating a new science teacher, whom she suspects was behind the flash mob (and who made the students participate in the Milgrim-like exercise). She is about to learn that he has been lying about his past--that his motives for withholding information are extremely complicated--and that his true secret is much worse than she ever could have expected.
Learn more about the book and author at Jennifer Miller's website.

--Marshal Zeringue