"The Breathless"

Tara Goedjen adores fairytales, mysteries, and ghost stories.

She wrote her first story at age eleven about children who disappeared at midnight, and she’s been writing ever since. Mostly raised in Alabama, she played college tennis in Iowa and then moved to Alaska and Australia before heading back to the continental US.

While completing grad school, Goedjen worked as a tennis coach, a yoga instructor, a university writing teacher, and as an editor for a publishing house. These days, when she’s not making up stories, she's probably going for a hike, staring at a to-do list, reading a novel, or eating all of California’s seasonal fruit.

Goedjen applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Breathless, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Breathless features bullet holes, strange heirlooms, and veiled threats. On this page, sixteen-year-old Mae Cole is dealing with the aftermath of a startling event: a boy suspected of being involved with her sister’s mysterious death has just shown up on her doorstep. On top of that, one of her sister’s friends—someone Mae has never gotten along with—has just come back to town.

Mae hurried to where she’d left her bag and picked it up, slinging it over her shoulder. The weight of the green book in the canvas rested against her hip, and the pocketknife her dad had given her for her birthday poked out from the top flap. […] Then she saw Lance, for the first time in nearly a year, and her heart skidded in her chest.

This page is representative of the rest of the book since it hints at two very different threats surrounding Mae: 1) the untrustworthy people who keep showing up at her family’s isolated house in the woods, and 2) the subtle magic contained within the “green book,” a family heirloom that’s as powerful as it is dangerous. Mae doesn’t realize it yet, but her home is a place where wickedness lurks in both human and supernatural forms. She’ll need her pocketknife for protection, as well as a brave heart.

The objects and characters on page 69 foreshadow some of the secrets that are revealed in The Breathless—secrets that deal with an heirloom that’s been passed down from generation to generation in Mae’s family, and secrets that deal with Mae’s older sister, who wasn’t as perfect as Mae once believed. It’s up to Mae to find out what really happened to her sister, before history repeats itself.

Visit Tara Goedjen's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Breathless.

Writers Read: Tara Goedjen.

--Marshal Zeringue