The Page 69 Test: "We Love to Entertain"

Sarah Strohmeyer is a bestselling and award-winning novelist whose books include The Secrets of Lily Graves, How Zoe Made Her Dreams (Mostly) Come True,

Smart Girls Get What They Want, The Cinderella Pact (which became the Lifetime Original Movie Lying to Be Perfect), The Sleeping Beauty Proposal, The Secret Lives of Fortunate Wives, Sweet Love, and the Bubbles mystery series. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Boston Globe. She lives with her family outside Montpelier, Vermont.

Strohmeyer applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, We Love to Entertain, and reported the following:

The Page 69 Test, I’ve come to appreciate, is accurately freaky. For example, on page 69 in We Love to Entertain, a key character – Erika – is reminiscing about a pivotal encounter between her boss and Erika’s former boyfriend, Colton. This actually turns out to be a major plot point later on. Plus, the passage illuminates the characters’ personalities, I hope, with a touch of humor.

Erika’s boss is Hayley, aka Holly, Barron, a reality TV star wannabee who’s rehabbing an estate she and her husband, Robert, ~~stole~~ legally acquired from a crazy sad sack down on his luck and who’s now vowed revenge. Erika’s a local girl, a Vermonter, who desperately wants to escape this claustrophobic ski town that continues to judge her harshly (and unfairly) for an incident in her past. She’s hanging all her chances of leaving on the success of this show.

By this juncture, readers are aware Holly and Robert have disappeared mysteriously shortly after their wedding. Erika’s just trying to keep everything together when she remembers a minor annoyance that might turn into a major logjam – a handcrafted Vermont farm table promised by her former boyfriend, Colton, that has failed to be delivered. And Colton himself appears to have gone AWOL, too.

Here’s her memory (on page 69) of Holly and Colton’s first encounter:
Now his skin was leathery brown and his baby fat had disappeared into chiseled muscle. He’d ditched the polyester purple dress shirts with coordinating ties in favor of a worn moss-green tee that showed off his toned biceps. A thin, braided bracelet of ocean plastic in the same deep blue as his eyes circled his wrist, and when Holly made a comment that was mildly profound, he’d twitch his Cupid’s-bow lips in deep, spiritual understanding. He smelled faintly of patchouli mixed with goat soap and his most recent bong hit.

“Feel this.” He took Holly’s hand, extended her index finger, and traced it along a watermark at the bottom of the bowl. “That’s the original wood grain and it tells a whole story of the tree’s history, its age, even the weather in which it grew.”

“Oh, wow,” Holly moaned. “I’ll never look at another piece of wood the same way again.”

Colton gently released his grip while maintaining her gaze. “Not just any wood...”

Do not say it. Don’t you dare say it, Colton Whitcomb, Erika thought, grimacing.

“My wood.”

Yup, he said it!

By the end of their visit, Holly had commissioned a massive Vermont farm table for $7,500 and even wrote out a check for half that as a deposit. Colton promised to keep her apprised of the table’s progress with regular updates; Holly said she’d like that. Before they parted, he gifted her a pine cone pendant he’d made himself that was supposed to bless the wearer with eternal life and fertility.
This excerpt captures the essence of We Love to Entertain’s theme about how the greedy with lots of money and connections like Holly and Robert Barron use the locals for their own advantage without pausing to contemplate the consequences of their avarice.

Though We Love to Entertain was written to be fun with the thrills and laughs of a rollercoaster (at least, that was the goal, there are actually a few serious concepts I explore. I am someone who came to a pristine place like Vermont as an outsider and then became an insider as Town Clerk. I’ve witnessed people lose their homes due to financial misfortune. In fact, I bought such a house myself at a tax sale – the inspiration for this book. So, I am among the guilty.

As the population expands, as the rich get richer and the middle class fades, the gap between the haves and the have nots grows wider and deeper. Holly Barron thinks nothing of paying $7,500 to a local guy to make a table as a show prop. For Colton, this consignment means life or death. Literally.