Tuesday, February 15, 2022

"The Cage"

Bonnie Kistler is a former Philadelphia attorney and the author of House on Fire and The Cage. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, magna cum laude, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a moot court champion and legal writing instructor.

She spent her law career in private practice with major law firms. Peer-rated as Distinguished for both legal ability and ethical standards, she successfully tried cases in federal and state courts across the country.

She and her husband now live in Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.

Kistler applied the Page 69 Test to The Cage and reported the following:
Page 69 of The Cage contains a flashback to six weeks before the elevator incident. Shay has arrived for her job interview at the company and is waiting for someone to greet her:
I mustn’t let my hopes rise. I strode past the white leather banquettes to the windows and pretended to admire the view. The city was out that way, somewhere behind the wall of fog. Once it was the only place I considered working––Wall Street, the center of the legal universe––and I wouldn’t work for anything less than a mega-firm with branch offices throughout the country and a few international offices to boot. Now here I was, desperate for a job in the suburbs, for a position in a corporate law department I would have sneered at before.
I'm afraid this is an epic fail of the Page 69 Test! A browser who glances at this page alone would have no clue what the novel is about. But that’s a good thing, because the thrust of the book is set up in the opening pages. The Cage literally starts off with a bang.

Page 69 does give the reader some important insights into Shay’s character. Once a high-flyer at a big Wall Street law firm, she’s been essentially unemployed for the last five years. She’s desperate to land this job and bitter about the circumstances that have brought her here––a bad economy, bad luck, and her own bad choices.
Visit Bonnie Kistler's website.

Q&A with Bonnie Kistler.

--Marshal Zeringue