"The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors"

Michele Young-Stone earned her MFA in fiction writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. Once, many years ago, she was struck by lightning in her driveway. She survived.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, and reported the following:

Surprisingly enough, I think page 69 thematically captures much of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors. Even though neither of the main characters is mentioned on this page, one of the main character’s mother, Abigail, is discussed:

In the last year, Abigail had lost one hundred and twenty pounds. One year married, she was miserable. She wore long-sleeved shirts and long pants despite the Arkansas heat to hide her sagging skin, and she was determined more than ever to save enough money to leave John Whitehouse and her mother, Winter Pitank, behind. She was going to take Buckley and move away from Mont Blanc, Arkansas. She wanted to see the ocean.

The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors is about starting over, never giving up—being a survivor.

The past, like the slop she inspected, sped by, can after can and memory after memory, making her wonder if forgetfulness wasn’t a blessing.

Lightning strike victims often suffer memory loss, and another theme relevant to the novel is: Letting go of the past so we can move forward and live our lives fully, free of blame and regret. The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors is about maintaining and/or finding hope in the bleakest of circumstances.

Read an excerpt from The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, and learn more about the book and author at Michele Young-Stone's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Fortuna"

Michael Stevens is a Silicon Valley insider and a contributor to several high-profile web sites in the technology field.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his first novel, Fortuna, and reported the following:

I think I got at least an B minus. Fortuna is about a computer science grad student at Stanford who gets hooked on an online role-playing game called Fortuna. The game becomes the center of his life to the detriment of everything else: his friends, his grades, his bank account, and ultimately, his chances of staying alive.

On page 69, the hero actually says, “I’m a grad student at Stanford University” (10 points for character definition). He’s shown declining a dinner invitation with dear friends so he can get back online (15 pts for showcasing one of the novel’s central themes). He catalogs the tasks he’s ignored (15 pts for substantiation). He alludes to the “princess” he’s chasing (5 pts for a somewhat vague references to a second major theme, the setting of the game in Renaissance Florence with its parallels to today’s Silicon Valley). He even hears his friend urge him to pay more attention to his rl (“real life”) girlfriend (10 pts).

Missing are any references to the gravity of his situation (organized crime is involved), his obsession with penetrating the cloak of anonymity that protects players, or his complex relationship with his father, whose sudden death nine years earlier is a mystery he’s never been able to resolve….

Hmmm. I think 60 points (out of a possible 69?) isn’t so bad.

Read an excerpt from Fortuna, and learn more about the book and author at Michael Stevens’ website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Snow Angels"

James Thompson, eastern Kentucky–born and –raised, has lived in Finland well over a decade and currently makes his home in Helsinki with his wife. Before becoming a full-time writer, he studied Swedish and Finnish and worked as a bartender, bouncer, construction worker, photographer, rare coin dealer, and soldier.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Snow Angels, his debut novel, and reported the following:

If I had to choose a page representative of Snow Angels, 69 wouldn’t be it. It contains characterization elements that go to the core of the personalities of the protagonist, but a reader judging the book as a whole based on page 69 would miss out on the book's key themes. Depression, alcoholism, racism, violence. The environment. I think the easiest way to illustrate the book as a whole is to include an excerpt more representative of it here, from pages 31-32:

Dad nurses a water glass half full of vodka in silence. I remember that my sister died thirty-two years ago today, that’s why he’s being such a prick.

The cold came late that year, but when it did, it hit hard. I was nine and Suvi was eight. Mom was a regular brood mare, five children in seven years. Dad wanted to go ice fishing. Suvi and I asked if we could come along and skate. Mom warned Dad that the ice was still too thin, but he hushed her up. “Kari will look after Suvi,” he said.

A lot of snow had fallen, but it was dry powder. The wind had blown it off the lake, and the ice was as slick and clean as glass. The afternoon was starry, and out on the ice we could see almost as if we had daylight. Dad drilled a hole in the ice and sat on a crate, fishing and warming himself with a bottle of Three Lions whiskey.

I tried to take care of Suvi. We were skating fast, toward the middle of the lake, but I was holding her hand. I heard a sharp crack, felt a jerk on my arm, and she was gone. It took me a second to understand what had happened, and then I was scared the ice would break under me too. I crawled to where Suvi fell through, but she was already slipping away. The last I saw of Suvi alive was her little fists thrashing, beating at the ice.

I was too scared to go in after her, and Dad was too drunk, so we did nothing. He sat there crying, and I ran for help. They drilled holes in the ice and dredged under it with fishing nets. It didn’t take long, she hadn’t drifted far. When they pulled her out, she had a look of surprise more than pain frozen on her face.

Read an excerpt from Snow Angels, and learn more about the book and author at James Thompson's website and blog.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Feathered Serpent 2012"

Junius Podrug is an accomplished writer of both fiction and nonfiction. He lives on Cape Cod.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Feathered Serpent 2012, and reported the following:

My books are suspense thrillers rather than hardcore science fiction, and I love “stranger than true” scenarios. Along that line, I’m fascinated with alien abduction stories—there are so many of them, often from credible people, that it’s hard for me just to reject them all as nonsense.

The instructions NASA has sent out with space probes to allow aliens to find us also interests me. The messages began in 1972 when a golden plaque about the size of a license plate describing who we are and where to find us was placed in the Pioneer 10 space probe. NASA says the messages are like a “ms. in a bottle,” thrown into the galactic sea, hoping it will be found by someone faraway.

Naturally, that led my twisted mind to the notion of a person who claimed to have been abducted by aliens has possession of the Pioneer plaque.

I dealt with that and other themes in Feathered Serpent 2012, in which the lead character, an astrobiologist, believes that the best place to find signs of other life in the universe is right here on earth from visitations in the past—and present.

Caden Montez, the astrobiologist, has an “alien abduction” experience in the tomb of the ancient Feathered Serpent god ancient Mesoamericans identified with the planet Venus. She later gets abducted by government agents to keep her quiet about the incident and is rescued by a secret group of people who called themselves “Frogs” because they claim to have been abducted and even dissected by aliens. The following conversation takes place between Caden and the leader of the group when he shows her the Pioneer 10 plaque.

“Are you going to tell me it’s real?” Caden asked.

“I don’t know what’s real anymore. Was Joan a prisoner in an alien brothel ... or her own imagination? Is Neo’s memory of abduction a security blanket against the terrible truth that he caused his wife’s death? Did you experience an alien creature in Teotihuacán ... or have a bad acid trip after an hallucinatory drug was blown into your face?”

When the character says he doesn’t know what’s real anymore, it rings true to me: There are so many changes in this world, happening so fast, that I don’t know what’s real anymore—and what’s science fiction.

Read an excerpt from Feathered Serpent 2012, and learn more about the book and author at Junius Podrug's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Thread of Sky"

Deanna Fei was born in Flushing, New York, and has lived in Beijing and Shanghai, China. A graduate of Amherst College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received a Fulbright Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and a Chinese Cultural Scholarship, among other awards. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she teaches in public schools.

She applied the Page 69 Test to A Thread of Sky, her debut novel, and reported the following:

I’d never heard of the “Page 69 Test” until I encountered this blog, but it’s my belief that any page of any novel should express, in some way, the essence of the whole.

In A Thread of Sky, a family of six fiercely independent women reunite to tour mainland China, seeking to reconnect with their ancestral home and with one another. In this chapter, the reader meets Kay, a 25-year-old activist who moved to Beijing in the wake of her father’s sudden death. When her mother calls to announce the tour, Kay is thrown. To her, a two-week package tour seems an utterly inauthentic way to explore China, nearly a mockery of how she has struggled all year to “trace her heritage in a place where history was being razed, paved over, replaced with steel, glass, and neon.”

On page 69, Kay has come with a classmate to explore Tiantan Park soon after dawn, and she is finally experiencing how one must-see still lives up to its name: Temple of Heaven. They have just marveled at the Round Altar, listened to their whispers traveling along Echo Wall, and watched elderly locals performing mysterious morning exercises in the woods.

And then they ambled through a gate into a vast courtyard and nearly collided with two wizened men absorbed in a kind of dance, flowing and meticulous. One was painting classical characters from right to left, while the other painted the mirror image of each character underneath, both pausing every few steps to dip coarse brushes into plastic pails. The two lines of calligraphy were divided by a long chink in the pavement, a horizon separating each object from its reflection.

A tourist might be content to leave with a photo of this scene, one imbued with an exotic, mystical aura yet as familiar and convenient as a postcard. But Kay is searching for something more profound and more elusive.

She began copying the first line into her notebook. The characters were immensely complicated, composed of traditional radicals whose meanings should have been obvious from their images—and surely were, to the other old-timers idly looking on, but not to her. At last she moved to the next line, and saw it was fading fast. She looked back to the first. It was gone.

The men were painting on the pavement with water. Dawn had given way to another day. After another minute, the men dumped out their pails and trundled off.

Like any tourist, Kay longs for those moments of wonder, of being transported, of getting outside of herself. At the same time, she has come to China to find herself, to reclaim her ancestral ties, which seem to be fading faster than she can discover them.

She seeks to divine a deeper meaning from those words on the ground, even as she understands that there is nothing mysterious about them to the locals around her. She wants to preserve them, even as she knows that the very notion of cultural preservation is not one that concerns many Chinese citizens; after all, in a country of one-billion-plus, there doesn’t seem to be much danger of losing their heritage.

Still, Kay’s longing remains. Ultimately, this moment becomes, to quote the last lines of the chapter, “another element of this country that took hold of her, even as it eluded her grasp.”

Read an excerpt from A Thread of Sky, and learn more about the book and author at Deanna Fei's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"WWW: Watch"

Robert J. Sawyer has been called “the dean of Canadian science fiction” by The Ottawa Citizen.

He is one of only seven writers in history—and the only Canadian—to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science-fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won in 2003 for Hominids), the Nebula (which he won in 1995 for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won in 2005 for Mindscan). In 2008, Sawyer received his tenth Hugo Award nomination for his novel Rollback.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, WWW: Watch, and reported the following:

Page 69 of WWW: Watch:

“How are you doing?” Caitlin asked, concerned.

“Exhausted,” her mother replied. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Ah, right! Dark circles under the eyes—but they weren’t circles; they were semicircles. Something else she’d misconstrued all these years.

Her mother shrugged, went on: “Nervous about what we’re doing, about what it—what he’s—doing.”

“He’s learning to see,” said Caitlin. “Trust me: a mostly harmless activity.”

“I have to go out,” her father said abruptly.

Caitlin was pissed. What could possibly be more important than this? Besides, it was her birthday, and they had a date to watch a movie later today.

“Ah, yes,” her mom said. “The Hawk.”

Caitlin sat up straight. “The Hawk” was her mother’s name for Stephen Hawking, who since 2009 had been a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute, making one or two visits each year. It came back to her: Professor Hawking had done a media day in Toronto yesterday—Caitlin was glad that her little press conference hadn’t had to compete with that!—and was being driven to Waterloo this morning in a van that safely accommodated his wheelchair. This was the Hawk’s first visit since her father had joined PI, and he was supposed to be on hand for his arrival.

Ordinarily, she might have asked her dad if she could come along—but this was not an ordinary day! She wondered which of them was going to spend it with the bigger genius.

Watch is the second book in my WWW trilogy; the first, Wake, came out last year and has just been nominated for the Hugo Award, science fiction’s top honor, for the year’s best novel.

Like Wake, Watch focuses on Caitlin Decter, a blind-since-birth teenage math genius in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. In volume one, Caitlin gained sight for the first time—and here, in volume two, she’s helping the entity she’s discovered to learn to see (and read!) as well.

And what is that entity? Nothing short than the World Wide Web come to life: out of the vast complex network of interconnections that is the Web a consciousness has emerged. It exists in a state of sensory deprivation, just as Helen Keller did at first. Caitlin has taken the role of Annie Sullivan—the miracle-worker teacher—to help the nascent Webmind engage with the real world, for although it exists surrounded by all the data humanity has ever produced, it has no way to access or interpret it.

Watch explores what it means to see, to feel, and to think; it’s a celebration of the mind, and the senses, and I think this page hints at that quite well.

Read an excerpt from WWW: Watch, and learn more about the book and author at Robert J. Sawyer's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: WWW: Wake.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Rat"

Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of five novels and one book of non-fiction.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her most recent novel, Rat, just published by Alfred A. Knopf, and reported the following:

I read a massive amount of contemporary fiction, and yet I am one of those indecisive cheapskates who loiters in bookstores, skimming through the Recent Release shelves, trying to figure out whether or not I want to take the plunge and buy the book. Now, thanks to Marshal Zeringue, I may just have found a system.

My own book, Rat, comes out pretty decently on the p. 69 test.

The novel is set in a honky-tonk beach resort in a gorgeous but godforsaken stretch of French Mediterranean coastline where I myself lived for six years with my husband and our two kids.

It tells the story of a French girl nicknamed Rat who is being brought up by her charmingly feckless single mother Vanessa. Rat is the product of a one-night stand. She has never met her father, an Englishman who picked up Vanessa one night in a seaside disco. Rat and Vanessa live in a kind of hand-to-mouth, waif-and-strays’ paradise, along with Morgan, an orphan whom Vanessa adopts. But when Vanessa’s new boyfriend begins taking an unhealthy interest in Morgan, Rat realizes that it’s time to take him away in search of the father she’s never laid eyes on.

Page 69 takes place in the bedroom which fourteen-year-old Rat and eight-year-old Morgan share. It’s the middle of the night. Rat is lying awake in her loft-bed, listening to the sound of her mother Vanessa and Vanessa’s boyfriend Thierry’s drunken brawling from the bedroom next door. She is terrified that Thierry, a big burly guy, is going to hurt her mother, who is tiny. She is trying to find someplace safe in her own head. She is already beginning to dream about going off to London to find her biological father, but she is scared to leave Vanessa with her abusive boyfriend.

Here is how it goes:

When Rat was younger, she believed in gods—the water nymphs whom the ancient Celts used to worship at the hot springs above Brix, or Artemis, who had the man who saw her naked turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hounds. Even Jesus—not Meme Catherine’s blue-eyed babe, but Max’s Jesus, who taught you not to judge and not to set too much store by worldly things. Now all she believes in is finding somewhere quiet in your own head.

Below, she can hear the soft rumble of Morgan’s sleeping breath. It’s the only safe sound to hang on to, like a match flicker you need to keep alight.

Normally at this hour of the night you might hear the owls hooting from their nest in the hollow plane tree. Or farmyard dogs barking, first one and then all the others. Or distant trucks rattling back and forth to Spain. Night sounds, lonely but not unpleasant.

Tonight all she can hear is the shouts from her mother’s bedroom, voices ugly with anger, recrimination. Rat tries to plug her ear holes with spitball Kleenex, but it doesn’t keep the sounds out.

Occasionally she can make out a word or phrase: Money. Lies. Money again. Most of what Vanessa and Thierry fight about is money.

The shouting is louder and angrier than usual. It seems as if it will never stop. Suddenly, Thierry’s voice, right outside her bedroom door: ‘Is that what you want, bitch, is that what you want? If that’s what you want, watch out, because you might just get it.’ And Vanessa, mocking, shrill, ‘No, it’s what you want.’

There’s a loud slam, a kind of thud, a crash like a chair being knocked over, a little scream from her mother. And silence.

I hope this extract will tempt readers to read my book.

Learn more about the book and author at Fernanda Eberstadt's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beautiful Assassin"

Michael White's novels include the New York Times Notable Book A Brother’s Blood and two Connecticut Book of the Year finalists, The Garden of Martyrs and Soul Catcher. He is the director of Fairfield University’s MFA program in creative writing.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Beautiful Assassin, and reported the following:

Page 69 from Beautiful Assassin:

Sometimes even, during quiet moments like these after a long, hard day of battle, I’d try convince myself that what I felt for Kolia was, indeed, love, at least a form of love, that the war had somehow distorted everything, twisted my feelings all about, drained me of my ability to feel anything. Or sometimes, I wondered, what was love anyway. Hadn’t my mother warned me about my silly romantic notions, that love didn’t put a roof over your head or comfort you in old age? What would its absence really matter after such a terrible thing as this war? Kolia and I had been good friends, we would be good friends again. We would comfort each other. I would read my poetry to him, and we would listen to the music student Kovalesky’s cello strains floating upwards into our apartment (though, of course, all that was gone, our apartment building, all of Kiev). We would take long walks along the river, both of us secretly imagining Masha holding our hands, our love for her and our shared pain over her absence binding us together as love never had. At night, I pictured Kolia and I clutching each other like a pair of frightened children, until we fell asleep. For each, the presence of the other would soften loss, would help us to forget all the death that we’d seen, all the death we’d caused. I’d promised myself that I would remain loyal to him and his soothing love would sustain us both. Perhaps, I told myself, I hadn’t really known how to love before the war. Perhaps whatever I’d thought was missing from our life together then would somehow seem inconsequential after all of this. And perhaps, as Zoya said, some night we would come together in our terrible loneliness and need, and begin another life.

The above excerpt from my novel Beautiful Assassin captures the essence of the novel, a story about war and one woman’s struggle to survive it not only physically by emotionally and psychically. The novel is about the life of a famous Soviet female sniper in WWII, Tat’yana Levchenko, a heroic woman who has lost her child to the Germans and now contemplates what her world, and her own life, might be like after the war. The passage talks about what the war has done to her, how it has distorted her feelings, perhaps even those of love for her husband. Tat’yana feels that perhaps with a new-found love for each other, she and her husband will be able to comfort each other over the loss of her child, and perhaps might even be able to start over, both in their love for each other and by having more children. The excerpt also raises the question of loyalty, both the loyalty that Tat’yana has for her husband and as well as the question of loyalty to one’s country. Later in the novel, when Tat’yana is invited to come to the US, both of those loyalties will be supremely tested.

Browse inside Beautiful Assassin, and learn more about the book and author at Michael C. White's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Queen's Lover"

Vanora Bennett is the author of two works of nonfiction, Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya and The Taste of Dreams: An Obsession with Russia and Caviar, and the novels Portrait of an Unknown Woman and Figures in Silk.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Queen's Lover, and reported the following:

On page 69 of my novel, The Queen’s Lover, my male lead, the young Welshman Owain Tudor, is asked by his hostess, the Parisian woman writer and court figure Christine de Pizan, if he would accompany her on a trip out of Paris. Christine wants to make her annual visit to the monastery at Poissy where her daughter, Marie, is a nun, but – given the dangers of the developing civil war in France - would rather have an escort for the road. When Owain agrees, the bond of friendship develops between the young messenger from the English court and his gifted, if slightly scary, literary hostess strengthens.

Because this encounter doesn’t feature the book’s central character, Catherine de Valois, I guess it is untypical. But what it does is to introduce one of the central themes of the book – refuge from violence.

Catherine, like Christine de Pizan, lives in a land ruled by a schizophrenic King and fought over by royal brothers and uncles. Catherine is the neglected youngest daughter of the king, and Christine her teacher. Both women are so frightened of the ever-worsening anarchy they live in that the act of planning possible escape routes for themselves becomes a major part of their motivation in life.

As the book develops, it’s not just the king’s madness, the civil war and the total breakdown of law and order that disrupts French lives, but also the invasion of France by the English. Because she is a princess with few choices of action beyond marriage, Catherine’s escape route involves sleeping with the enemy - a marriage of state with the canny, victorious English King, Henry V, and a move to the hostile territory of England where - even if the people are foreigners, and their wealth is built on the destruction of France, and she’s never quite known how to explain away the troublesome feelings she’s always had for Owain Tudor - Catherine can know relief from fear.

Christine’s resources are very different, as the choice of refuge she makes. Christine, brought up at the French court where her Venetian father was the King’s astrologer, has been left almost destitute after her young husband died in debt, but through sheer strength of purpose, talent, intelligence and good PR with the nobility, has climbed back to become the first women to be paid to write poetry for the court. She’s spent years making a living writing the chivalrous troubadour verse of the day, as well as everything from military treatises to histories of past kings to lectures on how princes should behave to accounts of her own grief at being widowed, all beautifully illustrated in her women-only atelier in the gloriously sophisticated art world of medieval Paris.

Christine’s longed-for place of escape is, therefore, the peaceful monastery at Poissy, where she dreams of being reunited with her daughter, for 365 days of the year instead of just the one a year she’s permitted while she’s still at court. She sees Poissy as a place of almost miraculous freedom from the wants and needs of this world. All that keeps Christine from running there for good is the knowledge, once she goes behind the walls, that she’ll never see her equally beloved son, Jean, and his two small children.

There’s a third important female character in the book, Joan of Arc, whose attitude to war contrasts sharply with both Catherine’s and Christine’s. Fear doesn’t cripple Joan. When war breaks over her life, this simple peasant girl doesn’t seek a place of safety. Instead, she hears voices telling her to go and join the French army, and, after several stories of miracles, emerged at the head of it bearing a sword often said to have been given her in a miracle. Joan believes God wants to use her as an instrument to save the French.

Joan only comes into this story when she’s already a prisoner in the hands of the English, heading for the flames of her subsequent burning. By this time she’s half mad with fear, and mistakes Catherine, when the princess sneaks into her cell, for a visitation from a holy Saint Catherine. But Joan is still brave enough to keep to her principles.

Learning about Joan’s courage, and the way she’s being cheated by the English not only out of a fair trial but out of her very life, is what finally jolts Catherine out of a lifetime of passive acceptance of her lot and into more positive action to reorganize her surroundings so she can live it to the full, and be with the man she loves.

That, and the unexpected help of her whimsical, selfish old mother … the queen whose monstrous cynicism is said to have set the French civil war going in the first place…

Browse inside The Queen’s Lover, and learn more about the author and her work at Vanora Bennett's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Claude & Camille"

Stephanie Cowell is the author of Nicholas Cooke: Actor, Soldier, Physician, Priest, The Physician of London (American Book Award), The Players: A Novel of the Young Shakespeare, and Marrying Mozart.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Claude & Camille, and reported the following:

Page 69 in Claude & Camille: a novel of Claude Monet is actually an interesting page. The 25-year-old Claude, a struggling artist, has managed to get the lovely upper-class Camille to come to his studio alone to model for him. He’s trying to show her that all he wants to do is paint her (not quite true) and the first thing she sees on the wall is a female nude by his friend Renoir! Her parents don’t know she’s there; his roommate is away. There’s the early beginning of a great deal of sexual tension. Some short scenes later they will end up in his bed and she will live with him and enter into a life of great passion and great difficulties.

The book covers such a large span of time (from Claude’s first attempt at landscapes at age 17 to his rising against tremendous tragedies by the end of his 30s) that it is hard to say if this one page is typical. The novel begins when he is nearly sixty-nine in Giverny and on the cusp of his first great exhibition of his water lily paintings. He is also trying to make peace with his past and has written to Camille’s sister who holds him responsible for Camille’s early death. There is a great deal about Claude’s penniless painter friends (such as Renoir and Cézanne) who will, by the novel’s end, be known as Impressionists. The novel asks a question: is poverty and suffering and struggle for the artist and those who love him worth the art? Without it, would Monet have created his masterpieces?

So page 69 is one of the pages where you see how they are drawn together. The painting he begins on that page, The Woman in the Green Dress, will bring Claude his first great success. He cannot touch her because he has to stand aside to paint her as his ideal woman. She romanticizes loving an artist and he is very handsome; he is her ideal and she is his. It leads into the rest of the novel.

Read an excerpt from Claude & Camille, and learn more about the book and author at Stephanie Cowell's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Snakes Can't Run"

Ed Lin is the author of the novels Waylaid and This Is a Bust, both winners of Asian American Literary Awards. He lives in New York.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Snakes Can't Run, and reported the following:

Shucks, page 69 of Snakes Can't Run is representative of a major theme in my new book -- coming clean about your past.

It's set in the hot summer of 1976 in New York's Chinatown. Robert Chow, a 25-year-old Asian American and Vietnam vet, is taking on his first detective-track assignment after a few years of walking a bullshit beat.

This particular page shows a confrontation between Robert and Andy Ng, a guy about the same age who has taken the reins of the family business -- a multinational conglomerate of illicit operations.

Like a lot of modern Chinese criminal enterprises, Ng's company has its roots in ethnic Chinese resisters to the Qing Dynasty, which was when Manchus ruled the country. Thing is, when the Qing collapsed, the Chinese decided it was more profitable to remain underground.

This sets up an early Michael Corleone-esque declaration from Andy.

We walked west toward Chinatown.

"You don't have anything on me. You know why?"

"You're good at getting other people to do your dirty work."

"No. That's something my father's good at."

I turned to him. He was looking straight ahead.

"This is not going to be a surprise to you, Robert, but Beautiful Hong Kong isn't a completely legitimate business."

"You don't say."

"But under me, it will be. I'm transitioning the company from a legacy of triad businesses to a socially responsible and modern corporation. I've already created a space for our youth. They can learn to be proud of our culture, of who they are. An awful lot of our kids are at risk for delinquency now in Chinatown, but I don't have to tell you that."

"Yeah."

"I know you were born here, Robert. Are you proud to be an American?"

"Well, pride is a sin, so I'll just say that I'm very pleased."

"But you know what, brother, you're not really an American. You know what Malcolm X said? 'Sitting at the table doesn't make you a

Bonus points if you can finish the quote without Googling it.

View the Snakes Can't Run trailer, and learn more about the book and author at Ed Lin's website and blog.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Informer"

Craig Nova is the author of twelve novels and has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also the recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, and other publications.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Informer, and reported the following:

I looked at page 69 of The Informer and I have to say that this page seems to operate as a sort of fractal, that is a pattern that is the smaller part of the larger pattern of the entire book. The book, after all, is about a woman who is trying to be clear about what is going on in a city where motives are obscure, acts are violent, and people are exceedingly devious. This scene, on page 69, shows a woman, Armina Treffen, a detective in the serious crimes section of the Berlin Police department, trying to make sense out of the appalling murders of young women. Armina, by the way, is coming into a part of the work force that was previously forbidden to women. Anyway, here is a sentence from this page and one that I think presents one of the central issues of the book, that is the attempt to make sense of a constant horror and the obscurity of the motives that are responsible for it:

The city had a fascination with the sexual murders of young women, and cabarets had reenactments of some of the most notorious crimes, not to mention that some paintings were done of these assaults. Why, she wondered, were there so many more of them than before? Was there some impalpable quality in the air, some fascination with doing these things, as though the horrible violence of them served as a substitute for some otherwise lacking clarity?

Read an excerpt from The Informer, and learn more about the book and author at Craig Nova's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue