"I Am the Swarm"

Hayley Chewins is the critically acclaimed author of The Turnaway Girls and The Sisters of Straygarden Place. She grew up in Cape Town, and now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her husband and daughter. She is the singer and songwriter for the alt-pop band Eight Thousand Birds.

Chewins applied the Page 69 Test to her YA debut, I Am the Swarm, and reported the following:

Page 69 of I Am the Swarm contains the following poem:

“Did something happen? With Mamma?”

Dad shakes his head.

Meaning: Having you looked around lately?

Meaning: Where have you been these past few months?

Meaning: Don’t ask me to tell you. Don’t ask me to say it out loud.

If you were browsing in a bookshop and you opened my book to page 69, you’d get a good idea of the style of the prose. The spareness of Nell’s voice is evident here, and so is the use of white space. Quite a lot to get from 39 words!

What page 69 leaves out, though, is the strange, irrational magic that the book contains, which is a huge part of the story. So I’d say the test is partly successful, but the reader might be surprised a few pages later when Nell’s mother is suddenly seventeen again, or when Nell herself wakes up after a nightmare to find her bedroom floor sticky with black beetles.

What page 69 does really well, though, is give the reader of sense of all the silence in the book. I Am the Swarm is, in part, a story about all the things we can’t say to one another, and page 69 is a good example of that theme coming through.

Visit Hayley Chewins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue