nominations for the Georgia Peach Book Award, YALSA’s Quick Picks for Reluctant Readers, Bank Street College of Education’s Best Children’s Books of the Year, ALA’s Rise: A Feminist Book Project List, and ALA’s Rainbow Booklist, and was named an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Young Adult. When she’s not writing she enjoys board games with her family, attempting to keep her garden alive, or looking up craft projects she’ll never get around to completing on Pinterest.
Hartl/Lane applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Best Little Motel in Texas, and reported the following:
Page 69 features Cordelia and the chicks trying to come up with a list of suspects for the murder of the local pastor and debating what makes someone a suspect. Cordelia thinks the pastor’s wife is guilty of poisoning him, while my the chicks think it’s the local land developer, but mostly because they can’t stand her.Visit Lyla Lane's website.
The Page 69 Test works well for my book because it showcases the main characters just starting the investigation. They’re already putting together a list of both suspects and people they don’t like, and the way they chime in on individuals gives a good sense of their history, personalities, and their relationship with people in town. It’s a nice blend of both plot and character development.
I don’t want to spoil anything, but I drop a pretty significant clue on this page that doesn’t feel like a clue at all and is only mentioned in passing, but becomes Very Significant later on. Part of the fun of writing a mystery is leaving little breadcrumbs for the readers to pick up on, so it’s funny that I was asked to do this test and the page number given happened to have a great deal of relevancy to it.
My Book, The Movie: The Best Little Motel in Texas.
Q&A with Lyla Lane.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
