a New York Times Editors’ Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year. Her next four novels, The Detour, Behave (an Amazon Book of the Month), Plum Rains (winner of the Sunburst Award), and Annie and the Wolves (a Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction Book of the Year) reflect her diverse interest in the arts, history, science, and technology, as well as her love of travel and her time spent living abroad. Starting with The Deepest Lake (a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Book of the Month) and continuing with her new novel, What Boys Learn, Romano-Lax has swerved into the world of suspense fiction, although she continues to write historical and speculative fiction as well.
She applied the Page 69 Test to What Boys Learn with the following results:
On page 69, Abby starts to question what her sixteen-year-old son Benjamin is telling her about a stupid thing he was just caught doing: breaking into a neighbor’s house to steal a girl’s diary. Worse yet, another girl in town was recently found dead. Abby has ignored lots of signs up until this moment, but now she’s getting wise. We get hints that her ex-boyfriend, a cop, might be fibbing about the break-in as well. This page encapsulates the stakes and the world we’re in, where you can’t trust anyone and the choices a woman makes—in her family, in her love life—may not be good ones.Visit Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.
On top of that, the scene on this page alludes to something Abby found in Benjamin’s room. And that discovery takes us into Abby’s past, when her brother—now in prison—hid a similar item. The plot’s many strands criss-cross this page in multiple places!
The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.
The Page 69 Test: The Detour.
Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).
--Marshal Zeringue
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