hardcover and paperback and which the New York Times called, “immense, intense and imaginative,” Whisper Hollow, also named an Indie Next Great Read, and 11 Stories, named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2013 and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards for fiction. She also wrote the children’s picture book The Word Burglar, and the Audible Originals “Eddies” and “Grieving Conversations.” Cander’s fiction has been published in twelve languages. She lives in her native Houston with her husband and two children.
Cander applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Young of Other Animals, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Chris Cander's website.Monday, March 27, 1989The Page 69 Test doesn’t give much insight into the novel as a whole, but if I were a reader and not the author, I’d find it interesting enough to want to know what else was going on. Here we have a slightly injured woman returning home from a trip to the grocery store, to which she wore a fur coat. Who wears a fur coat to buy produce? And why does she now hate the thing? That alone would make me want to know who this Mayree character is. Then she’s screaming for her housekeeper to unload the car but ends up doing it herself because Felicia is again cleaning a man’s unused study. Who’s Frank and why is he never there? Finally, the banker’s voicemail trails off and leaves me wondering what Mrs. Baker has been nagging him about. There’s clearly some tension on this page, but it poses more questions than it offers insights.
Earlier that afternoon, Mayree had carefully driven home from the supermarket, worried the wind might hurl another shopping cart, or something worse, at her. By the time she got there, her knees had begun to ache and stiffen. She pulled into the driveway, popped the trunk, and hobbled inside through the back door.
“Felicia!” she called, dropping her purse on a chair and peeling off her fur coat, which she now loathed. “I’m home! Groceries are in the trunk!” No answer but the sound of the vacuum running. Mayree could tell by the sound that she was in Frank’s study—why Felicia insisted on cleaning it every week when nobody ever went in there was beyond her. “Dammit,” she said. The ice cream would melt and the vegetables would thaw if she left them in the car until Felicia got around to it. She brought all the bags inside in two limping, barefoot trips, the pebbled walkway shredding what was left of her pantyhose, shoved the frozen and perishable items into their repositories wherever they would fit, then checked the answering machine for messages.
“Mrs. Baker, this is Ernie Duncan from Texas Commerce Bank returning your calls. I wish I had more definitive news for you. I know how frustrating it must be, but we’re still working on—”
What the reader can’t know from this section is that Mayree and her college-age daughter, Paula, are grieving the recent death of Frank, their husband and father respectively. Paula has also just suffered a violent physical attack by a stranger, and is struggling in secret with its aftermath. The two women are estranged even as they live together, and their relationship with each other and the people closest to them are about to get upended when Paula finds a terrifying letter in her book bag. This threat of ongoing violence forces Mayree and Paula to confront their trauma and secrets in a way they never could’ve imagined.
My Book, The Movie: The Weight of a Piano.
--Marshal Zeringue
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