The Page 69 Test: *ROCKED IN TIME* by Charles Degelman #page69

 

They say if you want to really find a good book, go to page 69 (the middle and meat of the book) and you like it, it's definitely worth reading. For today's feature, I'm zooming in on page 69 of Charles Degelman's new historical fiction,Rocked in Time.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

Rocked in Time (Volume Three in the Resistance Trilogy) slips behind the scenes of a blasphemous theater company hell-bent on toppling America’s Vietnam-era establishment with punch lines, pratfalls, and comic rebellion. Along the way, our protagonist pursues a love for the stage, a passion for resistance, and the intimate politics of sexual revolution amid the tear-gassed campuses and burning cities of a nation at war with itself.

Release Date: October 18, 2022

Publisher: Harvard Square Editions

Soft Cover: 978-1941861882; 408 pages; $22.95

Amazon: https://amzn.to/3AhO7NW

Entitlement. I returned to the Copley Square Hotel, cash in hand. There was no receipt.

A week passed. Precious biological time was ticking, doubt laced our bodies with adrenaline, and the welldressed gentleman had our money. Panicked, Lucky and I returned to the hotel unannounced, raising the ire of our liaison. There had been a delay. He would contact us.
 

The call came with time, place, and instructions. I don’t remember much about the trip. There was a train out of North Station, silence between Lucky and me. I remember the yellow wallpaper on the waiting-room walls in the farmhouse where Doctor Sunshine performed his procedure. There must have been a return trip to Boston. Lucky sat side by side in silence, watching the landscape tick by, numb, confused by the loss of an embryo that would have become a baby, a little kid, then a teenager and a grownup. What would that person become, be like, the living outcome of an angry fuck? Would that make a difference? What would Lucky and I become? Would we stay together? I shuddered, not at the prospect of being with Lucky, but at the awful inevitability of birth and life and destiny. If the tiny speck grew into a person, who would he or she be? Would he or she be anything like me? Or Lucky? Or both of us. Would the child live to grow into an adult? Die? Travel, fight a war, have sex, make other children, become a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a bum? What if we gave birth to a murderer, a Hitler? I felt a weight, the speculative reckoning of 70 years or more of human existence.

What do you think? Would you keep reading?