The Page 69 Test: "One Year Gone"

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

"One Year Gone"

Avery Bishop is the pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels including the newly released One Year Gone.

Bishop applied the Page 69 Test to the new novel and reported the following:

One Year Gone is about a mother, Jessica Moore, whose daughter, Wyn, goes missing the year before. Jessica hasn't given up looking for Wyn, and everyone else has decided she's left town and will never come back, until late one night Jessica receives a series of text messages from Wyn saying that she's in danger. The book contains various timelines, mostly present day and the day that Wyn goes missing, and on page 69 it's one of the flashback chapters focusing on Wyn. Specifically, page 69 is about how Wyn used to volunteer at the local animal shelter, and how she had made it her mission to get one unlucky dog adopted:
There was one dog in particular, a mutt named Uno, who had been at the rescue for almost two years. He was maybe three, four years old. He’d been clearly abused as a puppy. He needed to be in a home where there were no other dogs to compete with and no children.

He’d been adopted previously but the couple had brought him back after a week, saying they didn’t think he was a right fit. It was explained to them that sometimes it takes a while for a dog to adjust, but the couple didn’t want to bother.

Uno had looked so confused. He didn’t understand what was happening. He’d gone back into his kennel, his ears down, and curled up in the corner, looking so hopeless.

Wyn had wanted nothing more than to adopt him herself. She’d even talked to her mom about it, and it was clear her mom had considered it before pointing out Uno would be alone most of the time, what with her mom working practically ten hours a day and Wyn going to school and then work, and then what would happen once Wyn graduated and went to college? (At that time, Wyn had been on board with the idea of college.)

Now that wouldn’t be fair to the dog, her mom had said, would it?

Part of Wyn hadn’t cared; she just wanted to bring Uno home, show him that there was life outside the rescue. But she knew her mom was right. And so Wyn had made it her goal to get Uno adopted.

In the end, it had taken almost three months. Wyn had started a social media campaign, taking pictures of Uno in super-adorable poses that she would upload to the rescue’s Facebook and Twitter accounts. One of them had him sitting at a table, a cake in front of him, a bib tied around his neck. Uno’s eyes were big at the knowledge this was a treat for him. Wyn had added the caption: Uno loves cake, but he’d love having a home even more!
If a reader opened to page 69 in One Year Gone, would they get a good idea of the whole work? I would say no. They would at least get some good background on Wyn, which hopefully would make her an appealing character to root for, but based on that page alone, they would not even know that the chapter is a flashback chapter.