"Days of Wonder"

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Days of Wonder, With or Without You, Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, and Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Many of her titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines. Many of her titles were Best Books of the Year and Indie Next Picks. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was also shortlisted for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Goldenberg Fiction Prize winner. She recently won an award from the MidAtlantic Arts for portions of her next novel, The Inseparables.

Leavitt applied the Page 69 Test to Days of Wonder and reported the following:

Days of Wonder is written in a dual time line, one section following the characters all the way up to a terrible crime, and the other section is about how their lives unfold afterwards. This page 69 is actually the very first moment in one timeline where we meet young, innocent, naive Ella.

Page 69 begins a new chapter, with Ella, who lives in a poor area of Brooklyn, going to a fancy party on the Upper East Side. What we learn on that page is that she’s afraid to go in, afraid she isn’t pretty enough or wearing the right clothes. Afraid she doesn’t belong. And at the same time, like in any Romeo & Juliet part of a story (or West Side Story, as the case may be), she has this feeling that something might happen to her.

This is a book about two kids, Ella and Jude, who fall in love, and don’t want to be separated by Jude’s abusive dad, so they fantasize killing him. And then the fantasy starts to become reality, except it’s an attempted murder neither one remembers. If you knew the opening of the book, or if you knew what the book was about, this page 69 would make you want to know more, because this is the Before part of the dark After. I thought seeing her so young and girlish juxtaposed nicely with the start of the novel, where not only is she clearly not innocent, but she’s getting out of prison in a media storm and desperate to recreate a new life and new identity.

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue