selection. Vibhuti lives with her husband and daughter in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she works in international development. She began her career as a corporate lawyer in New York and holds degrees from Yale University and Harvard Law School. She grew up in Guilford, Connecticut.
Jain applied the Page 69 Test to Our Best Intentions and reported the following:
Page 69 is an excellent entry point into the heart of Our Best Intentions. What a fascinating test!Visit Vibhuti Jain's website.She’d arrived to find her pristine office unlocked and two detectives plus a handful of police officers and school district officials, including a lawyer, crowded into it. They’d dragged in stray chairs and were presiding over her immaculately organized desk like it was a communal workstation. Some of them had looked up when she walked in, and one – maybe both – of the detectives had acknowledged her with a nod. She received a cursory briefing from one of the detectives. A run-on sentence that went something like: a student, Henry McCleary, has been stabbed, he’s in the hospital, in the ER, his family is with him, they’re upset, their lawyer’s here, two bystanders were on-site, both students, we have them, a friend of his and a girl, who called 911, there’s a third student, an African American girl, she’s the stabber, we believe – here Mabel could swear the detective had paused, just for a second, to scan Mabel’s practiced poker face (her jaw clenched, but she knew how to wear impassivity) before continuing – she appears to have run off and is presumed dangerous. There was no opportunity for questions (of which she had many). It concluded with “Good that you’re here. It’s an active situation. We’ll let you know what we need,” followed by another nod, as if to say, “Run along.”Our Best Intentions is written from multiple perspectives, primarily following the Singh family, Babur “Bobby” Singh and his teenage daughter, Angie Singh, but it also includes the views of other characters from the community. The passage on this page is written from the perspective of high school principal Mabel Burrowes. Mabel has just learned of a horrific assault that happened on the high school football field. She feels instantly sidelined during the police investigation and is conscious of the racial undertones in the police’s assumptions, themes that recur throughout the novel.
Q&A with Vibhuti Jain.
--Marshal Zeringue
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