"The Tenth Girl"

Born in Los Angeles, Sara Faring is a multi-lingual Argentine-American fascinated by literary puzzles.

After working in investment banking at J.P. Morgan, she worked at Penguin Random House. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in International Studies and from the Wharton School in Business. She currently resides in New York City.

Faring applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Tenth Girl, and reported the following:

This page opens on the eerie serenity of the remote Patagonian cliff of the infamous Vaccaro School. Mavi, a young teacher from smoggy Buenos Aires, delights in the fact that there's "No, CAFE HERE! No, public restroom, its walls of tiles begging to be defiled by an angsty teen. No empanada stands touting peso meat pockets. No gift shops full of miniaturized, seizure-inducing junk. I peek through the shuttered window of an unused cottage and find the interior dark, its contents impossible to see. But the glass itself is spotless. This mountain seems to exist inside some sort of time-exempt vacuum, in which dirt and dust and droppings and dew cannot accrue."

Her classroom cottage is chilling perfection: plucked from a dream and fully stocked. She can't know just how deep of a gothic spiral she's entered, but she feels the thrum of its wrongness in her bones: the house insists on that.

The page closes by hinting at the sticky hot core of the book, so I think it does indeed pass the page 69 test.

"Is this our moment?" Mavi asks, of the strange woman who knocks on the door of her cottage. The woman offers a sad little smile.

Visit Sara Faring's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Tenth Girl.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Professor of Immortality"

Eileen Pollack graduated with a BS in physics from Yale and earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is the author of the novels The Bible of Dirty Jokes, A Perfect Life, Breaking and Entering, and Paradise, New York, the short-story collections In the Mouth and The Rabbi in the Attic, and the nonfiction books The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull.

Pollack applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Professor of Immortality, and reported the following:

Maxine Sayers is the founder and director of the fictional Institute for Future Studies at the very real University of Michigan, where I’ve taught creative writing for the past 25 years. When a Unabomber-like terrorist publishes his manifesto, she begins to suspect it was written by her former student. As the plot unspools, Maxine needs to decide if she should share her suspicion with the FBI, a decision complicated by her affection for that former student and his friendship with her son.

I hope the suspense keeps readers hooked even as Maxine explores the questions the bomber raises in his manifesto. While she deplores his use of violence, she, too, wonders how we might respond to advances in science and technology that threaten to destroy our privacy and our environment and might result in the deaths of millions of people and wipe out countless other species.

Page 69 marks a quiet spot in the novel, as Maxine remembers her father’s early influence on her career. Having been trained as a radio technician in WWII, her father returns home to open a TV sales and repair shop. His predictions about the future fascinate Maxine, and she grows up helping him in the shop. When he dies of a faulty heart valve, she decides to become an engineer,

a field for which she seemed uniquely prepared by all the years she had spent acquiring skills even her male lab partners envied.

The problem was, she had loved tinkered at her father’s bench because she had loved tinkering beside her father. The smell of soldered lead caused her eyes to tear up from a longing to feel her father’s arms around her as he guided her hands on the red-hot iron. Without him, she hadn’t a clue what gadget to invent. She considered changing majors. But what would she change her major to?

Rather than invent new gadgets, Maxine decides she will study the effects brought about by the inventions of others. Later, Maxine becomes obsessed with the changes that drastically extended lifetimes—perhaps even immortality—might create for the human race. Although I came to my own interest in future studies through a slightly different route—as a child, I was told that girls couldn’t grow up to be scientists or mathematicians, so I earned a degree in physics. And yet, page 69 does capture at least some of my reasons for writing this book. Why are we letting so many young straight white men design and evaluate the technology that will shape the future? Where are the voices of all the rest of us, who will need to live in that future, too?

Visit Eileen Pollack's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Perfect Life.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Dangerous Engagement"

Ashley Weaver is the Technical Services Coordinator for the Allen Parish Libraries in Louisiana. She has worked in libraries since she was 14; she was a page and then a clerk before obtaining her MLIS from Louisiana State University.

Weaver applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, A Dangerous Engagement, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I was effectively a prisoner in the washroom. I couldn’t make my exit now without letting them know I had overheard part of this delicate conversation. There was nothing for me to do but stay still and remain quiet until they had gone. I shifted backward, retreating a bit farther behind the door so I wouldn’t risk being seen.

“It’s got to be kept quiet,” Mr. Alden said in a harsh whisper. “I’ve been hearing things, that word is getting around, and that’s not going to work.”

“I don’t have any control over that.”

“Well, you’d better find some way to control it, or both of our livelihoods will be on the line.”

Page 69 of A Dangerous Engagement involves a conversation that Amory Ames accidentally overhears. Wiping a lipstick smudge from her gloves in a washroom off the foyer of her hosts’ home, she is trapped when two gentlemen began talking outside the door, unaware of her presence. Having arrived in 1930s New York for the wedding of her friend, Amory doesn’t expect to get pulled into another mystery. But the tense conversation she overhears between two men—who outwardly pretend to barely know each other— is just one of many things that tell her something isn’t right. She is soon proven correct when a murder occurs, literally at her doorstep.

A reader glancing at this page would get some idea of the intrigue and deception that exist beneath the glittering and glamorous façade of 1930s high society. This is a world where everyone is hiding something and no one can be trusted completely. It also gives an example of the sort of trouble in which Amory often finds herself—even when she doesn’t intend to get involved. Of course, once she’s found a mystery, she’s always ready and willing to look for a solution, and this case is no different. She is soon drawn into the world of speakeasies and bootleggers at the tale-end of Prohibition and must work with her husband Milo to bring a killer to justice.

Visit Ashley Weaver's website.

The Page 69 Test: A Most Novel Revenge.

The Page 69 Test: An Act of Villainy.

Writers Read: Ashley Weaver.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man"

Dave Hutchinson is a science fiction writer who was born in Sheffield in England and read American Studies at the University of Nottingham. He subsequently moved into journalism, writing for The Weekly News and the Dundee Courier for almost 25 years. He is best known for his Fractured Europe series, which has received multiple award nominations, with the third novel, Europe in Winter, winning the BSFA Award for Best Novel.

Hutchinson applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man, and reported the following:

Ooh. Yes, this one. This is actually quite pivotal. Alex is dithering about taking a commission to write a book about a supercollider buried under a couple of counties in northern Iowa. He's a freelance journalist and not doing very well, and the commission would pay him a very large amount of money, but there's something not quite right about the setup in Rosewater County. He's kind of intrigued by it, but at the same time he has a sense it might be best to avoid it. And then he's approached one evening by a British intelligence officer called Kitson, who basically blackmails him into spying on the collider operation. So all of a sudden Alex has no choice; he has to stay and do the job. I tried to load the book with stuff that was absurd and off-kilter, and this is one of the most absurd incidents. Alex is walking into town for dinner and all of a sudden MI6 turns up out of nowhere, driving an Accord, in the middle of Middle America, and recruits him. It's the point where Alex's freewill is taken away; he's now stuck in Rosewater County and he has to stay and deal with everything that happens next.

Learn more about The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man.

Visit Dave Hutchinson's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Return of the Incredible Exploding Man.

--Marshal Zeringue

"City of Beasts"

Corrie Wang owns and operates Jackrabbit Filly, a friendly neighborhood restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. She is passionate about libraries, recycling, and eating all the food, everywhere. Her debut novel, The Takedown, received much love from the New York Public Library and YALSA.

Wang applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, City of Beasts, and reported the following:

Alas, page 69 is not highly indicative of City of Beasts.

But first, a quick run down… City of Beasts is set in my hometown of Buffalo, NY. Albeit, a nuclear and environmentally crashed – yet plausible - future version of it. In this future, girls (fees) have grown up entirely separate from males (beasts) due to nightmarish events that happened after the world essentially broke.

The story centers around Glori, a fee who crosses into the city of beasts to rescue something invaluable, thereby encountering males for the first time in her life and smashing expectations all around. It is a thrill ride, dark yet funny, page turner of a novel, that takes a look at how we currently perceive gender and how we might if we were able to start with a clean slate.

Page 69, however, is one of the rare calm moments of the book. In this scene, Glori and her best friend Su, who joins her for part of her journey, are having their first ever meal with Sway and Comma, two of the beasts that Glori has stumbled upon who have agreed to help her on her quest. They are discussing how best to get back the item she seeks – spoiler, it’s Glori’s younger sibling – considering they don’t trust each other enough to even share a table.

Su leans back, arms crossed. “Sorry. I’m allergic to poison.”

Sway rolls his eyes and scoops porridge into his bowl. “Let me guess, Matricula Rhodes says that’s how we kill you. Fine. More for us. But please tell Madame Rhodes that if we were gonna poison you, we wouldn’t waste SpaghettiOs doing it.”

It’s just an offhand comment, still Su and I exchange a look. It goes unnoticed as the males fill their bowls. After clinking their spoons together, they begin inhaling their food with their mouths practically right to the edge of their dishes.

It is, quite frankly, gross.

“Learn some table manners,” Su grunts.

“What for?” Sway asks.

While this page might not be a prime example of the book, it is highly representative of my life because it’s all about food. Outside of being an author, I am also about to open a restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina, called Jackrabbit Filly. It will serve heritage driven New Chinese American dishes that won’t be too far off what the characters in this scene eat.

Imagine that.

Visit Corrie Wang's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Harp of Kings"

Juliet Marillier is the author of twenty-two historical fantasy novels and a collection of short stories. She was born and educated in New Zealand but now lives in Western Australia, where she writes full-time. The strong elements of history and folklore in her work reflect her lifelong interest in both. However, her stories are character-based, with a focus on human journeys and relationships.

2019 sees the release of two new novels from Marillier. Her stand-alone folkloric fantasy, Beautiful, based on the Nordic fairy tale East of the Sun and West of the Moon, was published in May. The Harp of Kings, the first book in a new historical fantasy series, Warrior Bards, was published in September. Marillier is currently working on Book 2 of Warrior Bards.

Marillier’s earlier works include the Blackthorn & Grim series and the Sevenwaters series, both set in a magical version of early medieval Ireland. She has won many awards for her writing, including five Aurealis Awards and four Sir Julius Vogel Awards, as well as the American Library Association’s Alex Award and the Prix Imaginales. In 2019 she won the Sara Douglass Book Series Award for the Blackthorn & Grim series. Juliet is a regular contributor to award-winning genre writing blog Writer Unboxed.

Marillier is a member of OBOD (The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids) and her spiritual values are often reflected in her work – the human characters’ relationship with the natural world plays a significant part, as does the power of storytelling to teach and to heal.

When not writing, Juliet is kept busy by her small pack of rescue dogs. She has four adult children and eight grandchildren.

Marillier applied the Page 69 Test to The Harp of Kings and reported the following:

The Harp of Kings is set in an imagined version of early medieval Ireland. While competing for places in an elite band of warriors and spies, our three protagonists are sent on a secret mission. An ancient harp has gone missing from a royal court not long before a new king is to be crowned. Tradition is that the Harp of Kings must be played at every coronation; if this does not happen, the candidate will be deemed unsuitable for kingship. Under cover as travelling minstrels, the team infiltrates the court with the task of tracking down the harp and returning it before its disappearance becomes public knowledge. The task proves far trickier than anyone expected. On page 69 our main protagonist, eighteen year old Liobhan, has found herself up in a tree, in conversation with a small girl who is hiding from her nursemaid. Liobhan is a forthright, outspoken character, both expert fighter and talented musician. She’s fiercely determined to perform the mission well and earn acceptance as an elite warrior. We’ve seen no softer side to her up till this point. In this excerpt, the child has just asked Liobhan if she can play her whistle. (Liobhan is going by the name of Ciara for this mission.)

“I could show you another time,” I say. “If Máire says it’s all right. Do you know how to play?”

“You could teach me.”

This is not what I’ve come to Breifne to do. What can I learn from a small child? But maybe the nursemaid, or big sister, or whoever the slumbering Máire is, will prove a more useful source of information. The girl’s pleading eyes are like those of a neglected puppy. “I could show you how to play a few notes. It takes a lot of practice before you can play tunes.”

She picks up both bag and plaything and hugs them to her chest, regarding me solemnly. The skin of her face and hands is very fair, and her nails are clean. Despite the tree climbing, her long hair is shining and has been neatly plaited, though some wisps are escaping. This is not the child of a servant.

“Only, no music up in the tree,” I tell her. “I might drop my whistle, and it doesn’t bounce very well.”

“Oh. All right. I like that tune that goes fast, really fast, with lots of notes.”

“And everyone gets up to dance?”

She nods, expression still grave.

“That tune is called ‘Artagan’s Leap.’ It’s quite tricky to play. We might start with something simpler.’

“Can we go and do it now?”

“No, because we have to find somewhere quiet, and you have to ask Máire if she approves, or you might get me in trouble. Also, if I’m going to let you play one of my whistles, I should know your name. Mine is Ciara.”

The child whispers her reply just as a woman calls from down below, “Aislinn! Where are you?”

“That’s Máire,” Aislinn says, still keeping her voice quiet. “She doesn’t know about this tree.” Now she sounds scared.

“You go down first, then, and I’ll wait until you’ve moved away.”

She slides quickly off the branch, making my heart jolt in fright. But she’s as nimble as a squirrel; I watch her rapid progress down the tree with admiration, wishing I could still do things as swiftly and silently. Partway down she stops and looks back up at me. “Don’t forget,” she mouths.

Is this passage typical of The Harp of Kings? Maybe. With each of the book’s central trio taking a chapter in turn, it’s had to put a finger on what is typical. Although this seems a lightweight scene, the encounter is significant. Liobhan is making a connection that will prove vital to the mission. The reader meets an important new character in young Aislinn, and sees a different side to the ambitious, driven warrior as she employs humour and kindness to reassure the frightened child.

Learn more about the book and author at Juliet Marillier's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Juliet Marillier & Pippa, Gretel, and Sara.

Writers Read: Juliet Marillier.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Imaginary Corpse"

Tyler Hayes is a science fiction and fantasy writer from Northern California. He writes stories he hopes will show people that not only are they not alone, but we might just make things better.

Hayes applied the Page 69 Test to his debut novel, The Imaginary Corpse, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Imaginary Corpse is a recap-heavy scene, but in some roundabout ways it provides a nice encapsulation of what the book is about.

I slump into Mr Float’s Rootbeerium with my head hung low, belly up to one of the cake-stools, and order two double-scoop floats, heavy on the whipped cream.

This opening paragraph is a good summation of the surface imagery of the book: surreal and childlike.

The Legion is swapping quips and war stories like usual, but it doesn’t take my detective stuff to hear the tension in their voices, or to see them taking turns watching the room over their shoulders. The news hasn’t hit them hard enough to make them abandon their favorite watering hole, but the idea isn’t out of the question yet.

Here you get to see Tippy's 'detective stuff,' his magical sixth sense that helps him interpret clues and provide details his normal consciousness might not pick up. You also see the more complex emotions backing up the phantasmagorical exterior of the book, and a hint about the effects the denizens of the Stillreal have on each other, both positive and negative – a theme that will come back again and again. Most important here is that Tippy is concerned by their upset, which says a lot about who he is.

Mr Float swings by, his bar towel now flecked with root beer and cream, and drops off a glass that might qualify as a vase. It's comfort food – a foaming, towering, foot-plus-tall heap of comfort food. I bend the extra-long straw to my lips, take a sip of carbonated brain food, and review the clues.

This paragraph shows off a touch of the narrative voice. It also anchors the 'childish' elements in the more complicated narrative by showing them as both everyday and a source of comfort.

There are other pages I'd pick as the ideal summary of the book, but page 69 shows off a lot of the heart, and that makes it a reasonable success.

Visit Tyler Hayes's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Imaginary Corpse.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sweetest Fruits"

Born in Saigon, South Vietnam, Monique Truong came to the U.S. as a refugee in 1975. Her novels include The Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth.

Truong applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Sweetest Fruits, and reported the following:

I didn’t write one word on page 69 of The Sweetest Fruits. Thank goodness because there are glaring historical inaccuracies. I’m a writer of fiction, but my third novel is a work of historical fiction, and facts are its flying buttresses, star anchors, and tie rods (mixing disparate architectural eras here). Instead, the writer was Elizabeth Bisland, the first biographer of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), a Greek-Irish author of over twenty books, who circumnavigated the world and who connected Elizabeth to the three women—Rosa, Alethea, and Setsu—whose first-person voices I did write. When Hearn passed away in Tokyo in 1904, he was well-respected and well-known as a Western expert on Japanese folklore, ghost stories, and cultural miscellany. Excerpts from Elizabeth’s biography of Hearn, published in the U.S. only two years after his passing, provide the official history of Hearn, while the voices of his mother and his two wives, the former born into slavery in Kentucky and the latter the daughter of a former samurai family in Matsue, Japan, calls that history into question. It’s this interplay between what is documented and what may have been lost or suppressed that is at the heart of The Sweetest Fruits.
--Monique Truong © 2019

Visit Monique Truong's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sisters of Summit Avenue"

Lynn Cullen is the bestselling author of historical novels The Sisters of Summit Avenue, Twain’s End, Mrs. Poe, Reign of Madness, and I Am Rembrandt’s Daughter.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Sisters of Summit Avenue and reported the following:

From page 69:

After eight years, Ruth knew to wait to see if this was one of the days that he could talk. And to not expect that it would be. So often when she sat with him, he couldn’t even open his eyes. They would quiver under his lids while his mouth and fingers twitched, like a long-dead monster coming back to life. No wonder the kids were afraid of him.

She took a deep breath and entered.

His eyes were open.

She cocked her head with surprise. “Hello.”

The “long-dead monster coming back to life” is John, a once-vital young man suffering from what was commonly called “sleeping sickness.” Millions of patients fell ill with encephalitis lethargica during a worldwide epidemic from 1915 to 1926. Many died, including the wife of the richest man in America, J.P. Morgan. Others, like John, and like my own grandfather, survived, only to be mostly confined to bed, sometimes lingering for decades. There was nothing wrong with the sufferers’ bodies. The victims retained all of their senses and were capable of moving—they simply could not stay awake long enough to interact. They could hear their families and see them, just not often join them.

This epidemic that affected so many lives is now relatively unknown. How did it drop from public consciousness? Because it ran its course at the same time as the Spanish Influenza epidemic? Because World War I and then rebuilding after the war commanded everyone’s attention? Or was it because of the mores of the time, families were embarrassed to have invalids at home, and so they kept it quiet? There were no public services to help patients and their families even if they did report an illness, so perhaps many long-term cases simply dropped from sight.

In The Sisters of Summit Avenue, set in 1934 in the middle of the Great Depression, one sister, June, is always golden. She marries well; she’s wealthy; she’s beautiful; she’s such a perfect hostess that she works developing recipes for that beloved food goddess, Betty Crocker. The other sister, Ruth, is the black sheep. She’s losing her husband’s family farm; she’s a little plain and way too blunt; her husband is bedbound with sleeping sickness. Yet each sister desperately wants something the other has. Page 69 hints at what that might be.

Learn more about the book and author at Lynn Cullen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Nanny"

Gilly Macmillan is the Edgar nominated and New York Times bestselling author of What She Knew, The Perfect Girl, Odd Child Out, I Know You Know, and The Nanny. She grew up in Swindon, Wiltshire and lived in Northern California in her late teens. She worked at The Burlington Magazine and the Hayward Gallery before starting a family. Since then she's worked as a part-time lecturer in photography, and now writes full-time. She resides in Bristol, England.

Macmillan applied the Page 69 Test to The Nanny and reported the following:

Page 69 is the start of a chapter about the detective investigating the human remains found at Lake Hall. Detective Andy Wilton, who is working class and no lover of the English upper classes, arrives at Lake Hall to interview Lady Virginia Holt. It’s not his first glimpse of the property but it is the first time he’s been inside, and he drinks it in, half-impressed, half-revolted that some people can own so much. It’s a great window into the tension between social classes that runs through the book and also the extremely privileged world that Virginia Holt and her family occupy. It hints at the fact that the Holts think themselves above the law. Andy also glimpses Ruby, Virginia’s eleven-year-old granddaughter, who is standing on the staircase, all dressed up in her grandmother’s clothes and luridly made up in her make up. Andy thinks of a David Lynch movie, emphasising how alien he finds the environment he has stepped into, and how surreal. The strangeness of the scene and the combative responses of Lady Virginia introduce a hint of menace.

Visit Gilly Macmillan's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Nanny.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Swipe Right For Murder"

Derek Milman has worked as a playwright, screenwriter, film school teacher, DJ, and underground humor magazine publisher. A classically trained actor, he has performed on stages across the country and appeared in numerous TV shows, commercials, and films. Milman currently resides in Brooklyn, New York, where he writes full time.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Swipe Right for Murder, his second novel for young adults, and reported the following:

I think page 69 is representative of the novel. Aidan, our hero, has hooked up with an older man at a ritzy hotel (via app) and the man has wound up dead. Getting embroiled in a gay terror group called The Swans, and being hunted by them and the Feds, Aidan has gone on the run, and he pretty much stays on the run for most of the story. The book has a lot of movement, Aidan always in flight. On page 69 Aidan has traveled from upper Manhattan to a warehouse party late at night in glowing, kaleidoscopic Brooklyn, where he's trying to convince his slightly drunk, slightly stoned best friend Jackson that he's in serious trouble. Jackson, in turn, is trying to get Aidan to examine some of his reckless behavior which led to all this drama to begin with. They're both blurry and off-kilter, in their own ways, not quite seeing the other person in front of them. Anyway, Aidan nabbed a flash drive from that hotel room, which curiously contains loads of photos of himself, even ones going back to him at school, and he needs to find out why, and soon. It's life or death.

Visit Derek Milman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Scream All Night.

Writers Read: Derek Milman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Man with No Borders"

Richard C. Morais's books include the New York Times and international bestseller The Hundred-Foot Journey, a novel about an Indian chef who conquers the rarified world of French haute cuisine. The book sold in 35 territories around the world and in 2014 Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey released The Hundred-Foot Journey as a popular film starring Helen Mirren and Om Puri.

Morais applied the Page 69 Test to his newest novel, The Man with No Borders, and reported the following:

By chance, page 69 ends with the happiest day in the narrator José Maria Alvarez de Oviedo’s long life. It is the day, as a teenager, José catches a record 28 salmon on the Sella River in northern Spain, while helping his much-loved younger brother Juan catch his first salmon on the fly. At the end of the day, the boys joyously gather with their father and uncle in front of the fishing lodge, as the river guides lay out on the grass banks behind them all the fish the Alvarez family have caught that day. The family, drunk on fish and scotch, poses for a photograph before their salmon slaughter, just as the sun is setting “and the air around the fish is, for a glorious moment, imbued with a pink-and-blue rainbow shimmer.”

But Jose’s final observation is only about his brother: “Juan never looked more radiant and alive and full of hope for the future. One hand was lightly and possessively touching the flank of the first salmon he ever caught on the fly, but his other, it must be said, was wrapped tightly around my shoulder, pulling me close toward him.”

In many ways the entire novel is contained in those two final lines of the chapter – José is drawn in close by his brother, both Juan and the very air they breathe redolent with love and life and hope, but below the surface of this scene there is a faint sense of tragedy and foreboding and a longing to hold on to this special moment forever. But that is life – such moments slip through our fingers forever and remain, in the end, only as wispy visions in our fading memory.

Visit Richard C. Morais's website; watch a video of the author explaining why he wrote the novel.

--Marshal Zeringue