Botswana, Thailand, and Malawi. Collins now lives on Exmoor with her husband and dogs, where she loves running and wild swimming. She is a graduate of the Curtis Brown Creative novel writing course.
Collins applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, Things Don’t Break On Their Own, and reported the following:
I love this idea! It turns out that page 69 in Things Don’t Break On Their Own is in fact very slightly different for the UK and the US editions, and personally I think that test works better when applied to the UK edition, so for this exercise, I’m going to work with that.Visit Sarah Easter Collins's website.
So here’s what it says on page 69 of the UK edition of Things Don’t Break On Their Own:I picked up her desk chair and lifted it inside her wardrobe. Then I stood on it and, on tiptoe, felt along the top of the inside frame where there was a tiny gap between the wood and the plaster of the wall, the space she used to stash the notes she lifted from my father’s wallet, rolled up into tight little tubes. Nothing.I’m going to say that for Things Don’t Break On their Own, the Page 69 Test works! What would a reader learn from reading page 69? This: that a young girl, Laika, is missing and that her sister does not know what happened, but that she has been driven by both loss and suspicion to be going through her sister’s bedroom, looking for clues. She describes her missing sister as untidy and unordered, perhaps suggesting that she herself is not. We learn that Laika had messy hair which, as later becomes apparent, is something that has some significance. We also learn that the missing sister was not undisposed to a little light theft (an astute reader might ask why.) There are also two big reveals. The first of these is that their mother has evidently been a victim of domestic violence, and that she protected her daughters from the full knowledge/horror of this when they were small children, by pretending to be clumsy. The second is the discovery of a broken necklace with a tiny silver dolphin, which is also highly significant. So to conclude, everything contained on page 69 is highly relevant to the whole book, and not just to the story but to its underlying themes. Even the tiny ballerina in the music box is thematically relevant, a woman trapped and turning on the spot.
I went back to her desk and looked through the jumble of things she’d left on the top of her chest of drawers – the hair ties and clips meant to tame her unruly hair, beads, a peacock feather. A china cat. A felt mouse. She was so messy. There wasn’t an order to any of it. I opened her pink jewellery box, a relic from childhood, and jumped as a small pink plastic ballet dancer sprang up and shuddered into life, turning on its stand to tinny music. Amazing the thing still works, I thought. I listened to the tune, feeling rushed backwards through time as an image filled my mind: my mother one day pretending to be that doll, turning jerkily on the spot with a strange, fixed smile on her face, while Laika and I danced around her, giggling like mad. It was funny, because, as children, we honestly believed our mother was the clumsiest person on earth. She always told us she couldn’t walk through a doorway without accidentally banging into it. Bruises bloomed like flowers on her arms. Silly me, she’d say, when we pulled up the long sleeves she always wore, when we traced their outlines with small fingertips, when we tried to kiss them better.
I snapped the lid shut.
Almost immediately I opened it again. There was something bright in there, something I’d not noticed before: a discarded thing in a child’s jewellery box, just one trinket among many others, easily overlooked.
With slow fingers I lifted out the object and held it up: a tiny silver dolphin, curled into a dive, shaped like a crescent moon. I stretched out the little silver chain. It was broken. The ballerina kept turning.
I must admit I’m completely fascinated by this snapshot, and how well it has worked, and I know I will definitely find myself turning to a book’s page 69 in the future, just to see what it contains.
--Marshal Zeringue
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