"When the Lights Go Out"

Mary Kubica is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of four novels, including The Good Girl, Pretty Baby, Don't You Cry, Every Last Lie, and the newly released When the Lights Go Out.

A former high school history teacher, Kubica holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in History and American Literature.

She applied the Page 69 Test to When the Lights Go Out and reported the following:

From page 69:

Suddenly it dawns on me all the information I’m liable to find when the woman locates my birth certificate. Not only the documentation I need to prove I’m Jessica Sloane, but the place where I was born. The exact time I slipped from Mom’s womb. The name of the obstetrician who stood below, waiting to catch me as I fell.

My father’s name.

In just a few short minutes, I’ll know once and for all who he is. Not only will I have proof of my own identity, but of my father’s as well.

On page 69 of When the Lights Go Out, twenty year old Jessie Sloan enters the Cook County Clerk’s Office in Chicago, where the Bureau of Vital Records is located, to try and track down her birth certificate – in the hopes of proving not only who she is, but of discovering who her father is. Jessie is a young woman whose mother has just died from breast cancer; she has no other family to speak of. Jessie has put the last five years of her life on hold to care for her ailing mother, but now, in the wake of her mother’s death, has made the decision to apply to college and make something of herself. But when the college’s financial aid office informs Jessie that her social security number is registered to a child who died seventeen years ago at the age of three, Jessie ventures off on an expedition to figure out who she really is.

Page 69 is quite representative of the novel in the fact that it sets the stage for what’s to come. Jessie soon discovers that there is no birth certificate on file for her and, as a debilitating insomnia begins to take hold, she falls down a delirious rabbit hole, trying to decipher if she’s really the person she thinks she is or if her mother had been purposefully withholding her real identity – and if that’s the case, why?

Visit Mary Kubica's website.

--Marshal Zeringue