Macavity Award for Best First Mystery and the Midwest Book Award in Fiction (Literary/Contemporary/Historical). Her second novel, Blackout, was a June 2022 Amazon First Reads pick. She is also the author of two short story collections–The Usual Mistakes and It’s Not Going to Kill You and Other Stories. She has held fellowships to Yaddo, MacDowell, The Sewanee Writers’ Conference, The Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, UCross, and The Vermont Studio Center. She contributes regular book reviews to Publishers Weekly and other venues.
Flanagan lives in Dayton, Ohio with her husband, daughter, two cats and two dogs. She is an English professor at Wright State University and likes all of her colleagues except one.
She applied the Page 69 Test to Come With Me and reported the following:
I don’t know what it is about the magic of page 69, but I’m delighted to report that once again, it captures something important in my latest book.Visit Erin Flanagan's website.
At the beginning of Come With Me, protagonist Gwen Maner’s husband dies suddenly, leaving Gwen and their daughter penniless. Ten years out of the work force, Gwen contacts an old acquaintance from her intern days, Nicola Kimmel, about a reference, but Nicola does much more than that. She ends up finding Gwen a job, a place to live, and the support she needs now that her husband is gone. But soon that support tightens into a vise.
Throughout the book, there are sporadic chapters from Nicola’s point of view, beginning in childhood and moving through to the present day. Page 69 follows a confrontation Nicola has with a bully on the first day of elementary school. Her older sister, Celeste, has pulled the bully aside to find out why he called Nicola a bad word.
On page 69, Nicola doesn’t speak. It’s all Celeste, cornering the other first-grade boy, and demanding to know why he did it. The fear the boy radiates reminds Nicola of when she and her sister cornered a cat between two wooden panels in the barn.Keith had the same look of fear in his eyes right now, although he tried to hide it behind a slouch as he kicked his shiny new shoe in the dirt. Nikki was wearing Celeste’s old pair of knockoff Keds from Payless.I’m hoping here to establish how observant Nicola is, and how aware she is of the things she doesn’t have that others take for granted.
As Celeste continues to intimidate the boy, Nicola begins to see the situation in a new light.Nikki understood two things at once: she felt an evil glee that Keith was getting his comeuppance after being so awful to her, and simultaneously bad that he was in the position she’d been in, cowed at the hands of someone bigger and stronger. It was, she realized, the most grown-up thought she’d ever had.So much of Nicola’s chapters are about her growing up and seeing things in this new light.
The cat comes back toward the end of the page as Celeste moves closer to the boy, and Nicola does as well.She pictured that tabby from the barn, chest heaving as his back arched in the air.Even though Nicola feels bad for the boy, she can’t help moving in.
This page, I hope, demonstrates where Nicola learns some of her core values as a child that have follow her in to adulthood, both good and bad: the importance of standing up for the people you love, a rigid and perhaps misplaced idea of right and wrong, and also that loving someone means taking charge of a situation at all costs.
The Page 69 Test: Blackout.
Q&A with Erin Flanagan.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
