Wriders, a weekly critique group that meets in Dupont Circle.Nellums applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, All That's Bright and Gone, and reported the following:
This is the page where we first meet Mac, an ambiguous character in the rest of the book. My protagonist Aoife (who is a six year old girl) thinks he's pretty fun, but the reader is suspicious because of the reactions of other characters. Is this page characteristic of the rest of the book? Well, it opens a new chapter so I only had a few paragraphs to work with, but we got some childhood nostalgia (the Penguin Palace, a real life ice cream parlor in Maumee, Ohio) and some childish enthusiasm - "The ice cream drips down the front of my dress, but Uncle Donny doesn't even get mad. He teaches me how to suck it out of the bottom of the cone like a straw!" - so I'd say yes. Like most of the book, we have a sense that things are simmering under the surface that our narrator doesn't quite understand, or even necessarily notice. But hopefully that just makes the reader more alert. They have to be, because Aoife and Teddy are pretty focused on the ice cream.Visit Eliza Nellums's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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