She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Beyond Absolution, the third book in the Reverend Mother Mystery Series, and reported the following:
By a piece of bad luck, page 69 in Beyond Absolution turns out to be the beginning of a chapter, chapter six, and so is a short page. And to add to its shortness, each chapter which deals with my main character, Reverend Mother Aquinas, opens with a quote in Latin from the works of her namesake Saint Thomas Aquinas – with English translation beneath it. The Reverend Mother is a great admirer of Thomas Aquinas and she finds support for many of her views on life and people from his pithy sayings, such as: ‘To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection; to bear with patience wrongs done to others is a mark of imperfection and even of sin’.Visit Cora Harrison's website.
However, this page also brings in Dr Scher who is a favourite character of mine. An elderly man, descendent of a Jewish immigrant, he is humorous, compassionate, quick-thinking and attractive. On this page we hear him before we see him. He is joking with a new recruit to the novitiate. It would be a few minutes before he arrived at her room, she guessed. The girl was homesick and her tear-stained face would make him take trouble with her.
The Reverend Mother, also, turns her thought to this new recruit. She had promised to give the girl a month’s trial, but that was: Before she had heard that the girl had been seeing visions, just like Sister Bernadette at Lourdes and had imagined herself a nun in the making.
However the Reverend Mother hopes that soon the girl will see that that she is unhappy and will agree to go home for a few months and to think again about her vocation. She is worried about the child but tells herself that: ‘Judging by the giggles that greeted Dr Scher’s feeble jokes, she was tiring of the angelic and melancholic pose adopted when first admitted to the convent.’
So, the luck was against me with this page 69 as it is, if one counts the words, barely half a page. On the other hand, I am reasonably satisfied as I think two of the main people in the book, the Reverend Mother and Dr Scher, show their characters. Dr Scher his kindness, his liking for jokes, his interest in all whom he meets and the Reverend Mother, who also shows concern, displays her quick-witted, common-sense, her deep sense of responsibility for those in her convent and, perhaps above all, her wisdom.
My Book, The Movie: Cross of Vengeance.
My Book, The Movie: Beyond Absolution.
--Marshal Zeringue
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