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....
Set up page 69.
Adam Fraser is a math PhD candidate who lives his life with structure and organization, maybe compulsion?
No. It’s just structure and organization. Completely normal
and understandable, okay?
When the book opens, Adam’s got a “friend” and “study
partner” named Amy. Amy is a music graduate student. She and Adam are in a
class together because Adam signed up for something called “Set Theory” that he
thought was a math class but turned out to be a music class.
Adam stayed in the class.
Not that it had anything to do with Amy, mind you. Music Set
Theory has logic and isoforms, so it’s worth studying.
Because while Adam will tell you that Amy is smart and
beautiful, he will then immediately tell you that he doesn’t “notice or care”
and that he and Amy are “just study partners.”
Really.
So, when Amy asks Adam to express his “feelings,” it doesn’t
go well. The only feelings Adam can easily identify are “tired” and “hungry.”
No. It doesn’t go well at all.
Losing Amy leaves Adam’s world fractured.
No. It’s not fractured. It just needs a little refinement.
That’s all.
So, in a quest for self-improvement Adam reads books on
evolutionary biology. There he discovers the blue-footed booby, a bird where
blueness of the feet is a sign of health in the males and is used in courting
displays.
From this Adam gets the idea to buy new clothes and improve
his look. (Hence the “blue feet” in the title).
Page 69 opens with Adam driving with one of his housemates,
Maria. (Adam lives in the basement and has three female housemates upstairs).
Maria is telling Adam to exit to “Fog Cut Terrace,” a fancy clothing district
in their fictional city.
What is the book about?
The book is about Adam’s quest. He would describe it as a quest
for self-improvement, though the reader will see it’s a quest for human
connection.
The problem is that while Adam comes to understand the appearance
of human connection, he doesn’t understand the substance of it.
For example, in preparation for a blind date, Adam watches a
rom-com in the theater, takes notes, and comes up with a “blind date algorithm”
that includes such things as “When the check comes, pay it right away. Don’t
ask her why she ate so much.”
The tragedy is that a lot of what he does is successful, or
just successful enough that he keeps doubling down on his methods.
The engine of the book is watching Adam come ever so
close to a breakthrough. Come so close to looking inside. So
close to expressing his vulnerability.
And then watching his logical brain override all that
nonsense.
But eventually the reader comes to see the hurts that led
Adam to build his walls. The question is whether Adam will come to grips with
them.
I don’t know if this counts as “what is the book about” but Blue
Feet started as recollections of mine from medical school. When my
thirty-year med school reunion came up, I was reminded of what I was like in my
twenties, how focused I was. (Probably had to be.) I started jotting down
anecdotes.
Maybe some of them had to do with moping about a girl. Maybe
not. I don’t remember.
But from those jottings, I discovered an earnest, prickly, unself-aware
voice that became Adam’s voice.
Do you think this page gives readers an accurate sense of your book? Does it align with the novel’s overall theme?
This page introduces you to the voice—Adam’s voice. His short sentences. The way he pays attention to the geometry of the world around him but tunes out the human part.
It also introduces some of his disordered thinking. Maria is
trying to take up smoking to lose weight. Adam doesn’t dwell on how destructive
that is. He just knows that Maria is working towards a goal and that she’s
accomplishing it, so that’s good.
And you get to meet Maria.
Adam’s three female housemates—Maria, Lisa, and Kaitelyn—are
key characters. Maria is the cynical law student. She helps Adam get new
clothes (without which the title of the book would make no sense). Lisa is the
emotionally intelligent one who sees that Adam’s “quest” is all about
forgetting Amy, though Adam denies it. Kaitelyn initially seems like the social
one, the one who sets Adam up on dates. Later we see there’s more to her.
The three of them are protective of him. They try to help
him. But mainly they serve as the reader’s surrogates, telling Adam “No! Don’t
do that!” Having one of them on this page is helpful for that.
But this page isn’t completely representative in that Adam
is at his most relatable when dealing with the housemates. When on his own, his
thoughts are often rigid, linear. Except when he’s thinking about Amy. Then he
borders on literary.
Not too literary, mind you.
This page also does NOT give you a sense of the isolation
that pervades this book. (The light tone of my description probably doesn’t
represent it either). Watching Adam be so alone and then watching him do things
to make himself even more alone walks a line between being funny and extremely
sad.
Does it align with novel’s overall theme? Yes. But since the
whole novel is told from Adam’s perspective, there aren’t major detours that
might make any given scene a complete outlier. It does give you a taste of the
path Adam has chosen to walk.
That’s it. Thanks so much to TNBBC for letting me share this
with you!
Page 69
Blue Feet and Green Sharks: A User's Guide to Not Being a Serial Killer
Chapter 14
“Exit! I said, ‘Exit!’”
It’s Maria. She’s in the passenger seat. She wants me to
exit. She’d been talking about her research assistant job and her demanding
boss. But at some point she switched to giving me directions, so it might be
time to pay attention.
I’m driving on an elevated part of the highway, passing the
white dome of the stadium. Ahead of us are the downtown black skyscrapers, with
the flat gray of the ocean behind them. We’re exiting into the district between
them—Fog-Cut Terrace. It’s a big pedestrian square surrounded by clothing
stores.
We take the exit, loop through narrow streets until Maria directs
me to a parking ramp, and we circle up and up. When we finally park, Maria
waits for me to get out, circle around, and open the passenger door. Then she
hops out of the car, lights a cigarette. Puffs it a few times without coughing.
Her hard work is paying off.
She stands, cigarette in hand. Black trench coat with a belt.
Black boots.
“Adam, when is the last time you bought clothes?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.” She puffs on a cigarette. “And you got the
idea to buy clothes from a biology textbook.”
“Yes.”
“There you go.” She
puffs again. “Biology is good for something after all.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He went to medical school at the University of Washington. His subsequent medical training took him to Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California. He is now a Professor of Radiology at a prestigious medical center in Rochester, Minnesota and has numerous academic medical publications.
He is now returning to fiction because he has two things he lacked when he was young—perspective and money. Blue Feet and Green Sharks is his debut novel.
Blue Feet and Green Sharks: A User's Guide to Not Being a Serial Killer
Character study | Coming of age
Release date: October 28 2026
A deadpan anti-rom-com character study of grief and rigid armor.
Adam Fraser is a first-year math PhD candidate with a friend and study partner, Amy - a music graduate student and a cellist. While Adam will admit that Amy is smart and strong and beautiful, he is adamant that he "doesn't notice or care." He doesn't just suppress his emotions. He can't even identify them.
He doesn't know how.
So when Amy asks Adam to express his feelings, the results are disastrous.
This starts Adam on a quest to understand human interaction. He reads books on evolutionary biology. He takes detailed notes on romantic comedies. He uses every tool of logic to control the messiness of real connection. And he keeps at it until his carefully constructed world falls apart.
Blue Feet and Green Sharks is a character study showing how the armor we wear so often weighs us down instead of protects us and the limits of reason in solving human emotion.
*AI Transparency - the author leveraged AI for fact verification and cover image touchups. The text and cover were all human creation.
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