"Good Eggs"

Rebecca Hardiman is a former magazine editor who lives in New Jersey with her husband and three children.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Good Eggs, her first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Good Eggs finds us in a chapter from Kevin Gogarty's point of view. Kevin, a middle-aged, married, recently unemployed father of four, is in the throes of a midlife crisis. In this scene, he is trying to invent an excuse to see, once more, the sexy administrator at his daughter's new school. The woman, Rose, is on her way out and Kevin is desperate to invent a reason to pass by her office and speak with her again. Barreling towards them and poised to spoil this moment is Miss Bleekland, the school's battle-ax of a house mother, with whom Kevin is about to meet to discuss his daughter's latest indiscretion (she was spotted throwing out a bottle of vodka and some cans of beer).

The page 69 test works pretty well because this is a funny scene, and one of the book's objectives is to make readers laugh. Kevin is stressed and hapless, two characteristics which I find very funny. Throw in old-fashioned lust in an inappropriate setting and it's even tenser. However, I think the page 69 test falls a bit short for Good Eggs because ideally it would feature our main character, Millie Gogarty, Kevin's mischievous mum, who is the star of the show. But if the reader kindly turns just four pages, to 74, Millie is to be found at the helm once again.

Visit Rebecca Hardiman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue