The Page 69 Test: "Pony Confidential"

Friday, November 8, 2024

"Pony Confidential"

Christina Lynch is at the beck and call of two dogs, three horses, and a hilarious pony who carts her up and down mountains while demanding (and receiving) many carrots.

Besides Pony Confidential, her new novel, she is also the author of two historical novels set in Italy and the coauthor of two comic thrillers set in Prague and Vienna. She teaches at College of the Sequoias and lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Lynch applied the Page 69 Test to Pony Confidential and reported the following:

Pony Confidential is told in two alternating points of view: a very grumpy old pony bent on revenge against the little girl who sold him twenty-five years earlier, and Penny, that now grown-up girl. On page 69, we’re in the point of view of Penny. She is incarcerated in Sticks River, a prison in upstate New York not far from Ithaca, where she and the pony last saw each other so long ago. Penny is in a dark place, awaiting trial for a murder she didn’t commit, and on this page she’s recalling how her happy childhood ended abruptly. She’s losing hope of a quick resolution to her legal problems and noticing that she and the other prisoners are treated like livestock—she thinks of horses, in particular—manhandled and subjected to violence, living only for their next meal. She’s afraid to act like a pony and rebel against the system.

I think Pony Confidential passes the Page 69 Test—that page does uncannily get to the heart of what the book is about. That said, it’s one of the more intense and unfunny pages in a very funny novel, so it’s also not representative of the book’s overall tone. But the themes—how trauma permeates our lives, how badly we sometimes treat incarcerated people, how badly we sometimes treat animals, how our justice system does not match our ideals, is all there on that single page. That cluster of pages is in fact the central turning point of the novel for both characters!

The Penny murder story was a later addition to the novel, and I quickly realized I didn’t know exactly what actually happens when you’re accused of murder. My privilege in being so isolated from that part of American life did not go unnoticed, especially because my own grandfather was tried—and found guilty—of murder in 1911 and sent to the notorious Sing Sing. I also live in an area of California that's home to many prisons, so there was a lot of the personal in what I say on the page: “the wheels of justice don’t seem to turn as smoothly as she was led to believe in sixth-grade civics.”