(not a joke). He lives in Indiana with his wife, their two kids, and two German short-haired pointers who are frankly baffled there aren’t more dogs in his books. The recipient of a prestigious “No. 1 Dad” keychain, Fox was widely recognized as having the best swaddling technique of anyone in the family when his kids were babies. And not just the immediate family―grandparents, aunts, uncles, everybody.
Fox applied the Page 69 Test to Schooled, his first novel, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Schooled finds the protagonist, Jack Parker, dropping off his daughter, Lulu, for her first day of kindergarten. Jack is a stay-at-home dad, and this is his first child to go to school, so it’s incredibly emotional for both of them. Meanwhile, two-year-old little brother Klay is looking on from his car seat and adds, not altogether helpfully, “Lu really sad.” The page ends with Jack seeing Chad Henson, his nemesis and competition for president of the school’s Active Alpaca Parent Board, in his rearview mirror.Visit Ted Fox's website.
This all makes for a pretty good window into Schooled as a whole. You have Jack wanting to be there for his daughter even as he knows he has to start letting go of some of the things he was able to do for her as a baby and a toddler. This is a conflict that’s at the center of him figuring out who he is outside of being a parent, which in turn is a major theme of the book. You get some insight into how he interacts with his kids and the way I approached writing conversations between the three of them. And you get a dash of Chad, Jack’s high school rival, who re-appeared in Jack’s life earlier in the book seemingly out of nowhere, much like he seems to do here in his BMW SUV.
Reading this page might not give you a full sense of how much humor I’ve tried to weave throughout the book—although Klay trying to suck his foot in the backseat isn’t not funny—but I think I’d be okay with a reader judging Schooled based on these several hundred words. Fittingly, when acquiring the book, my editor pointed to the larger first-day-of-school drop-off scene of which page 69 is a part as one of the most emotionally resonant pieces of the story.
--Marshal Zeringue
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