"Ruby Falls"

Gin Phillips has written seven novels and her work has been sold in 29 countries.

Phillips’s debut novel, The Well and the Mine, won the 2009 Barnes & Noble Discover Award. The Los Angeles Times called it “an astonishing debut” and noted that “a whisper runs through the novel — the ghosts of places and people and luscious peach pies, making it a combination of dream and nightmare, nightmare and dream.”

Her novel, Fierce Kingdom, was named one of the Best Crime Novels of 2017 by the New York Times Book Review. It was also named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Publishers Weekly, Amazon, and Kirkus Reviews.

Phillips applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Ruby Falls, and reported the following:

I’m always delighted by the alchemy of the Page 69 Test—I don’t know if it works well in every book, but it works astonishingly well in mine.

My novel, Ruby Falls, begins with a man discovering a waterfall in the middle of a mountain. He names it after his wife, Ruby, and opens the tourist attraction to the public …just as the Great Depression hits full force. Meanwhile, Ada Smith has been exploring the caverns around the falls on her own—she’s lost plenty in her life, but this underground world has opened up possibilities she had no idea existed.

Page 69 hits right as the reader learns the basic framework of the novel: a local newspaper article details the plans for a famous mind reader to arrive in town as part of PR effort to sell tickets to Ruby Falls.

“He has been invited to Chattanooga by Leo Lambert, discovered of Ruby Falls, in hopes that he will perform the most mind-bending display of his abilities to date,” the article says. “He will navigate the underground passages of Lookout Mountain, using only his psychic energy to locate a hidden hatpin.”

Ada is scanning the article after a man she barely knows knocks on her front door and announces he has a proposition for her. She’s met Quinton in the caverns once before, but now she invites him inside her home for the first time:

He takes off his hat and starts to sit down in the straight-backed cane chair by the coatrack, and she’s glad when he reconsiders. She’s not sure it would hold him.

“Tea?” she says, wishing she had sugar. “Or I’ve got coffee on the burner I can warm up.”

He rests a hand on the back of the too-spindly chair. “I’ll take the coffee, if it’s not too much trouble.”

She taps the back of her oak rocking chair, and he drops into it with less jouncing than she expected. She steps to the stove, pulling her matches out of the drawer.

Within a few pages, we’ll learn that Quinton wants Ada to accompany him on part of the expedition that’s being kept secret—the two of them will follow the mind reader and his party at a distance in case of emergency. But even before that reveal, I like how this page sets up the divide between Ada’s life aboveground and belowground. She’s been raised to believe that her roles in life will be as a wife and mother, and she’s tried to play those roles: she has, in the past, desperately wanted to play them. But after her babies never lived to take a breath and her husband died, she’s coming to terms with the fact that she’s not going to fit the mold of all the women around her. She’s finding a new narrative in the caverns, exploring on her own, thrilled by the unknown.

We see her playing hostess on this page, with all the usual trappings of coffee and comfy seats, but it’s not a role she’s entirely comfortable with anymore. Her path is forking, both because of her passion for the caves and because of Quinton, who winds up playing a large role in how Ada’s story unfurls.

Here’s another thing I like: while much of the novel plays out underground in a world flush with millipedes and oxides and limestone and bats, the Great Depression—the weight and fear and constancy of it—is a big part of this story. Ada’s house has a certain barebones quality that almost every house would have had—no sugar, no extra food, furniture used past its prime.

The limits of life aboveground make the strange splendor of the Ruby Falls caverns seem even more otherworldly.

Visit Gin Phillips's website.

Writers Read: Gin Phillips (August 2017).

The Page 69 Test: Fierce Kingdom.

The Page 69 Test: Family Law.

Q&A with Gin Phillips.

--Marshal Zeringue