Page 69 Test: Under the Blue Moon

Disclaimer: The Page 69 Test is not mine. It has been around since 2007, asking authors to compare page 69 against the meat of the actual story it is a part of. I loved the whole idea of it and so I'm stealing it specifically to showcase small press titles - novels, novellas, short story collections, the works! So until the founder of The Page 69 Test calls a cease and desist, let's do this thing....

 

In this installment of Page 69, 

we put Joan Schweighardt's Under the Blue Moon to the test.

OK, Joan, set up page 69 for us.

 

Lola, one of two protagonists in Under the Blue Moon, is broadsided by another car in the first chapter. Jamie, the man who hit her, makes a run for it when the police arrive on the scene, but after a chase through a neighbor’s yard, he is shot and killed anyway. Several chapters later, Lola, who feels connected to Jamie’s death, almost responsible for it even though he hit her, decides she must visit Jamie’s mother. The woman speaks no English, but her teenage granddaughter, Jamie’s daughter, is there (it’s clear that she lives there), and following Lola’s awkward attempt to explain why she’s visiting, the granddaughter informs Lola that her grandmother is not in the mood for company but she can return the following week.

 

On page 69, we find Lola leaving the house, sad that Jamie’s mother would not see her but thrilled that she has been invited to try again. She is already wondering if she should bring her dogs, Pete and Blue, along, to cheer up the granddaughter, who she assumes is, like Jamie’s mother, in deep mourning. As she begins to drive off, her mind wanders, and before she knows it she is going over the details of her own daughter’s wake and funeral, which occurred ten years earlier.

 

 

What Under the Blue Moon is about:

 

Under the Blue Moon is about a woman who has been living for years with grief and regret and a man who, as a result of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, has recently become homeless. The book cuts back and forth between her story and his. Outside of the fact that they both live in the same city (Albuquerque, New Mexico) and that their paths intersect every now and then, they don’t really know each other and their situations are totally different. What they have in common is that they have both reached the end of their respective ropes; they have been wishing and hoping for change and it has not arrived, so now they’re ready to try to trick it into making an appearance.

 

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the book is about? Does it align itself the book’s theme? 

 

Page 69 gives the reader a sense of what Lola has been through and the kind of person she is. The chapters in the book alternate between Lola and Ben, and since page 69 doesn’t mention Ben at all, the page can’t really be said to align with the larger theme of the book.

 

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 Page 69

Under the Blue Moon

 

Lola was already thinking that she could bring Pete with her. Or maybe Blue. She was imagining running that by Janet. Now that Janet had called George and told him not to come, she was happy with her old friend again. But regarding bringing the dogs over to the Hernandez house, she already knew what Janet would say. She would say it was entirely inappropriate. She was already hearing herself responding, “But the girl,” and Janet listing all the reasons: The people could be dog haters; did she see any dogs there? No! They could have allergies; they could have cats. Janet, Lola conceded, would be right, this time. But she still couldn’t keep the vision from playing in her head—the girl smiling, bending to pet both dogs, Jamie’s daughter laughing, maybe, forgetting for a moment that her father was dead and she’d have to find a way to go on without him. The girl and the grandmother stood at the door and watched her leave. She felt as if she was walking on rocks, or as if her legs were different lengths. Finally she reached her car, her van. She looked over her shoulder in time to see the door close.

 

On the way home Lola thought about Valerie’s wake, a scenario that was always right there, a dark shadow from the past that fell over any number of activities performed in the present. She thought about how shocking it had been to see so many young people pouring in for those two days. The funeral home had had to open a partition wall between what had been two reception rooms to make one big one. Good thing we only had the one body, she’d heard the funeral director’s assistant say to the director. Lola remembered thinking—cruelly, she knew, but she couldn’t help it—that if all these kids who were coming in clutching one another, sobbing their little hearts out, had been kinder to Valerie when she was living, maybe she still would be.

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Joan Schweighardt is the author of novels, memoirs, and children’s books. In addition to Under the Blue Moon, Schweighardt’s recent fiction includes the Rivers Trilogy—Before We Died, Gifts for the Dead and River Aria—which moves back and forth between the New York metro area and the South American rainforests from the years 1908 through 1929. She also conceived and co-edited an anthology entitled The Art of Touch: A Collection of Prose and Poetry from the Pandemic and Beyond, which features contributions from 38 poets and writers, to be published by the University of Georgia Press in November, 2023.