a USA Today bestseller. Her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, Fiction Southeast, Southeast Review, Hippocampus Magazine, Cognoscenti, and Bellevue Literary Review, among other places.
Brown has a BFA in film and television from New York University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington. She loves writing historical fiction because the research lets her live vicariously in another time and place.
Brown applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Whisper Sister, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Jennifer S. Brown's website.In New York, only a sign distinguised our synagogue as a place of worship. Inside, the musk of men lingered, mixing with the musty smell of books. The men who came weren’t the scholars of the Old World, with sidelocks and beards, but the everyday people—the tailors and factory workers, the pushcart operators and street sweepers—the people who dressed like Americans, who looked like Americans, but still sneaked off to pray. The men who put on yarmulkes before stepping into the shul and pulled them off as soon as they emerged.The novel takes place over the course of Prohibition, 1920 to 1933, in New York City. Minnie is 10 years old when she immigrates to America, where her father has been for the past seven years. Her father is involved with the Jewish mob, working for real-life gangster Arnold Rothstein. Her mother prefers to live in a world similar to the one she had back in Ukraine, surrounding herself with people from the Old World. When Minnie is 18, family circumstances force her to take over her father’s bar, which she turns into a swanky speakeasy.
The synagogue confused me. Papa held nothing but disdain for religion and the frauds who, he claimed, conned their congregants, bilking them of their hard-earned money. But Mama revered the rabbi, a learned man of God. She said religion kept people on the path of justness.
Who to believe?
In many ways, the Page 69 Test works perfectly on a thematic level. Minnie struggles throughout the book to find her place in America. Her father, who has assimilated, is a proponent of making his own way, earning money, moving up in the world. Her mother is still quite religious, doesn’t understand the need to learn English, and wants Minnie to grow up to be a respectable woman, a proper wife with lots of children.
Is Minnie Ukranian? Is she American? Is she Jewish enough for her mother? Is she worldly enough for her father? These questions plague her, and she desperately wants to find her own place in the world. As she grows older, more questions nag at her: Is it better to obey the law and be poor or to break the law and live a better life? To do the proper thing or the thing that gives her pleasure?
The excerpt from page 69, even though no cocktails are featured, definitely shows the beginning of Minnie’s struggles.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
