and the #Lovestruck novels. She happens to be madly, passionately in love with her soul mate and is a fervent believer in happily ever afters—which is why she writes romance. She currently lives with her family and various pets in Utah, and harbors a lifelong devotion to ice cream.
Wilson applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, A Tribute of Fire, and reported the following:
When I saw the Page 69 Test challenge I thought, “That’s not going to work.” But it did. On page 69, the history of the tribute selection is given by a historian. Two maidens will be chosen to race through a labyrinth-walled city while being hunted because of a grievous sin committed by a member of their nation in the past. The historian says, “We sacrifice to the goddess two of our treasured, precious daughters so that we may keep the rest. We know that those who are called upon to serve have the strength to endure the ordeal.”Visit Sariah Wilson's website.
My female main character, Lia, has bribed her way into being chosen. She intends to search for a specific relic that will save her cursed nation and the only way to get into the temple, which she can only enter by winning the race (something no maiden has done in a thousand years). She’s not happy about having to do it. Her thoughts following that statement— “This was another aspect that had always bothered me. This belief that women were special enough to be pleasing to the goddess, but that we were ultimately easy to discard and unimportant. Strong enough to be slaughtered by not important enough to fight for. And so it had fallen to me to step forward. I would fight. I would change the curse and the fate of every woman destined to follow by myself.”
The quotes above are absolutely the theme of this book. It shows Lia’s determination, her drive, her willingness to do whatever needs to be done to save her people, while emphasizing that she understands the hypocrisy and is angered by it. That these women are sacrificed every year while being told how amazing and special they are for doing so, but that because they are women, they were not important enough to go to war for. This tribute race was a real-world, historical event and while doing research about it, this was something one of the professors pointed out—that women were the sacrifices and honored for it but no one tried to stop it for their sake and this ritual lasted a thousand years. I do think page 69 is very representative of the book as a whole.
--Marshal Zeringue
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