"The Survivor"

Bridget Tyler grew up in Berkeley, California. She went on to attend NYU, living in New York and London before completing her degree and moving to Los Angeles to work in the film and television industry as an executive and writer. She now lives in Oregon with her husband, who is a robotics professor at Oregon State University, and her daughter.

Tyler applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Survivor, a sequel to The Pioneer, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Survivor turns out to feature a rousing speech from from my hero's beloved grandfather, who's also taken over leadership of her new planet now that a tragedy has transformed their team from pioneers to refugees, survivors of a dead world.

"The task seems beyond the scope of human imagination. It is certainly beyond me. But thankfully, we don't depend on my wisdom alone." He sucks in a breath and sighs it out. "My beloved wife died when our daughter was still a child. But she taught me a lot before she was taken from us. She always said a big problem is just a lot of little problems swimming together, like a school of fish. So if you want to solve a big problem, you just have to catch one of the little ones and gut it. Then you do it again and again until you're done."

He chuckles, almost to himself. "She was a ferocious woman, my Cleo. Dauntless. I can only hope at piece of her is still with me. Because the task facing us is monumental. But I know that we can accomplish it, one little fish at a time."

He rests a hand on the memorial stone.

"But first, we much honor our loss. Grieve. Then, tomorrow, we will face all those little problems. Together."

"Humanity is not lost. We are found. This planet is a new beginning. A clean slate, untouched and waiting for us to shape a new world. A new future."

Wow, the page 69 is pretty illuminating in this case! It's not exactly representative of the book, because it's not focused on Joanna and her friends. But it does outline a major theme of the book, and a lesson Joanna has to learn in order to untangle the mess she and her team find themselves in. It also hints at a huge mystery in the Watson family backstory Joanna will have to unravel in order to save Tau. Gah, I want to say more but I can't because of all the spoilers!!! Guess you'll just have to read and see how this passage pays off.

Visit Bridget Tyler's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Survivor.

--Marshal Zeringue