"The Things We Miss"

Leah Stecher was born and raised in Southern California and currently lives in coastal Maine. By day, she edits policy papers for an environmental nonprofit; by night, she writes middle grade fiction. She has strong opinions on tea blends, chocolate chip cookie recipes, and action movies.

Stecher applied the Page 69 Test to The Things We Miss, her debut middle grade novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 is the end of Chapter 8. Twelve-year-old misfit J.P. Green has recently discovered the magical treehouse door that lets her go three days forward in time, and in this moment she is riding high. She’s watching her Pop Pop—who has recovered from cancer—get out of a car unaided, and she’s remembering how much help he needed back when he was sick. His current health seems like a sign that everything is going right in her life—for the first time ever. The page ends with this exchange:

“What?” Pop Pop caught me smiling at him as he got out of the car in front of Thai Dishes.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. Nothing. Just, magic was real. Pop Pop was healthy and Mom wasn’t making me go shopping. “Nothing,” I repeated. “Just happy.”

I started this response by saying emphatically that the Page 69 Test did not work for The Things We Miss. But my mind changed as I wrote out all the reasons why not—and realized that they were actually pretty decent reasons why it would work as an introduction to the book!

The page does not introduce all of our most important characters. However, it does introduce J.P. and her Pop Pop—who is one of the most important side characters—and shows the depth of their relationship, which is a key element in the book. Moreover, J.P.’s relationships with her friends and family and the way that they strain and tear and come back together are the underlying fabric of this story, so a page that excavates any one of those relationships would give readers a clue that they could expect to see more like that throughout.

This page does not tell readers about how the magic works. But it does tell readers that magic is real in this book, in some form or another, and that our main character was thinking about it in the same breath as the everyday mundanity of going out to dinner and dealing with illness. This would hopefully give readers a sense that they had entered a contemporary world, with a bit of a speculative twist.

This page is mostly memories of the past, without context to understand their importance. However, this page does provide a number of warnings of what is to come for any readers who want to avoid books that deal with cancer. Taken as a standalone page, I found it a little ominous, like J.P.’s joy was too obviously about to be cut short. In many ways, this page serves a decent notification that this book may be quite sad at times!

Visit Leah Stecher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue