QueryDice #28

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Ms. Ruth,

       Calista Hall wakes one morning to find her servants gone, her bank accounts empty (I’m assuming this is historical because Calista has servants…but then how would she know her bank accounts are empty when she wakes in the morning?) and a debt collector knocking on her door, demanding whatever she can give as compensation. Against all social expectations of a once-wealthy woman of the times, Calista takes a job as a seamstress with a family friend. When she finds this isn’t as profitable as she thought, Calista posts an ad in the local newspaper for boarders to fill the empty rooms in her large manor by the sea.

This first paragraph divulges too much information. All we really need to know at this point could fit into two sentences: Calista Hall is living a nightmare. Her considerable fortune depleted (and, as briefly as you can, tell us how), she has no choice but to take boarders into the many rooms of her large manor by the sea.” If you feel it is integral to the story, you can add a sentence about how this is difficult for a woman of her station, or how she feels about it. Showing us how she feels about it is a good way to show us her personality a bit, something that is lacking in this query.

Days later, Nathan Ridley shows up on her doorstep, a man with a mysterious past and a mute boy brother by his side.

I like the mute boy brother. It is the most interesting part of this query. It sounds like Nathan is going to be a major character, yet I know nothing about him or his mysterious past (and we all love a man with a mysterious past). Show me what is going to make him a sympathetic character. Fold in a little of his personality or his quirks…or at least his sexiness, if in fact he is sexy. Show us what it is Calista sees in Nathan, so that we can like him, even from the get-go here in this query.

As a love that neither of them expected blossoms, Calista must maintain the home she loves, the ailing father she was left to care for five years before, and her status as a wealthy woman.

This doesn’t seem to be a big enough conflict. I don’t care about Calista’s ailing father, who I can’t see because you’ve only just dropped breadcrumbs about him, and at the end of your query, no less. This sounds to me like the story of a rich girl who is now poor and is fighting to be rich again, and of course she meets a love interest. That is not a very unique story, and I have trouble mustering up sympathy for a girl whose biggest complaint in life is that she’s not rich. I’m sure there is more to your story than that, but that’s all you’ve given me in this query, so I have no choice but to take it at face-value and pass on this.

Taking place over six months in early 1870s New England, (we don’t need to know a timeline, but the year in which the story takes place is helpful) [redacted] is a 92,000-word historical novel of a wealthy woman turned poor, who all at once is trying to keep her family together, battle the expectations of her station, and finding herself falling in love at the worst possible time.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
[redacted]

LR

 

QueryDice #27

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Ms. Ruth,

All Zach wants to do lately is fight. It doesn’t matter with whom or what.

He’s always had a problem with his temper, but never like this. Never to the point that he gets into fights and can’t remember why. Ever since he and his mom up and left their home in Florida for Dave-her new husband, he’s gone into uncontrollable rages. Zach knows there’s a trigger since he isn’t always mad, but needs helping figuring out what it is.

It is not believable to me that Zach’s rage started right after he and his mom moved in with Dave and Zach has no idea what’s causing his anger.

His latest psychiatrist thinks there’s something going on at home that’s triggering these rages. And she’s right, there is. That sonofabitch Dave is what’s going on at home. He prefers leaving Zach bruised and sore to spending time together as father/son, not to mention the black rings around his mom’s eyes that are becoming a regular occurrence.

For Zach, thanks to three fights in the last three weeks, any chance of a future hinges on learning to control his anger. He hopes his psychologist and her assistant, the girl he loves, can help with this. He wants to go to college, he wants to date, and he wants to survive Dave.

There is nothing specifically wrong with this query. I don’t think the conflict is complicated enough, though. We’ve already heard the story of the boy whose step-dad abuses him and his mother. What makes yours markedly different from those? While I agree that this is a theme welcomed and sought by YA readers, I think there needs to be something else, something big, specific and external, at stake.If there isn’t, then I can easily predict the outcome of this story: Zach figures it out. Who would write or read a story about an abused boy who has uncontrollable rages at the end of which the boy still has uncontrollable rages and is still abused? That’s why there needs to be a complication to the conflict here, or an added conflict.

This has more to do with the manuscript than it does with this query, though. The query was well-written. I know what the conflict is, who stands to benefit or lose-out, and what the challenges to solving it are.

ZACH’S FIGHT is my contemporary young adult novel and is complete at 60,000 words. I am a member of SCWBI and RWA.  Thank you for your time and consideration.

As always, please remember to say goodbye! A simple “sincerely, so and so” suffices.

Best of luck, LR

 

QueryDice #26

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Ms. Ruth,

As a result of your interest in women’s fiction, I hope you will enjoy A Shift in the Wind, contemporary women’s fiction with a speculative bent. Hmm. Speculative? I really like speculative fiction…I wonder how this turns out…

Augusta Collins was born in the wrong century. A lover of the elegance and slow pace of times gone by, she never liked the technology-crazed, faster-is-always-better life, so it’s a strange, but exciting occurrence when a solar flare storm knocks out electricity and she finds herself experiencing first-hand what her life would’ve been like had she any say in the time frame of her birth. How long is the electricity out? Also, this is not striking me as a noteworthy story.

The resurgence of beauty in the form of elaborate balls, the popularity of performing arts, and leisurely strolls in the rose garden are perfection, but change has the ability to both heal and kill – and it does.

Hold the phone. Have elaborate balls, performing arts and leisurely strolls in the rose garden returned to everyday life, or that this would be very nice? What do you mean they are perfection? Do you mean they are Augusta’s ideal, or do you mean they’re pleasant, or do you mean everyone in the world agrees that these things are perfection? The last sentence, for some reason, doesn’t sound wise to me. Its sounds like a reach, because you could swap any ol’ noun for “change” here. Chairs (to pick a noun off the top of my head) also have the twin abilities to heal and kill because you could knock somebody over the head with one, but also use one to get a healing rest from a day’s work. My point is, yes, change can kill and it can heal, but so can many other things, so what significance are you trying to highlight?

And what has changed so much that the world is significantly altered? Again, is the electricity out indefinitely, for months, forever? If it’s an extended period of time, I wonder if it is believable that engineers would not correct it. What changes has this brought about? Better yet, what changes has this brought about that we weren’t expecting?

It’d taken Augusta’s father a year earlier, murdered in split-second madness by a stranger, but it’d given her family 28-year-old Griffin Alexander, a former capital investor who, conveniently, knows nothing about how to run the Collins’ sheet metal manufacturing company and everything about money and combat.

This paragraph continues with that reach, which I think you’ve tried to use as a transition. Change did not take Augusta’s father, Augusta’s father’s death was itself a change. Why is Griffin’s age important, why is his former life important, why is it significant that he knows nothing about how to run the company, and why is this convenient? Why is it significant that he knows everything about money and combat? Is he an employee and if so, to whom does he answer?

This paragraph also signals the complete departure from the electricity outage and speculative world you were beginning to introduce, which makes for a very disjointed query.

 

If you hadn’t told me, I would be wondering if this was romance or women’s fiction, and that is a problem, because I worry that I’d read the manuscript and it would turn out to be some sort of hybrid. Hybrids are hard to sell–publishers are afraid of them–and many just won’t sell. (As an aside, don’t ever tell me your manuscript is “genre-bending” if you want me to read without suspicion.) I think this is probably women’s fiction with a strong romantic element, but the problem is I’m not sure. It could very well be romantic suspense.

Since that day, (since what day? The day of Augusta’s father’s death? The day of Griffin’s initial hire?) Griffin has protected and provided for the friends he considers family, but when Augusta discovers that Griffin may have risked their livelihood for the sake of his own, she makes a decision that may hurl her family into danger and swat down the affection growing between them – unacknowledged yet intricate and fragile as a spider’s web.

This paragraph generates even more questions. We have heard nothing of Augusta’s family, but now you’ve brought them into the query, so they’re a distraction. You have a choice here: either include some exposition of Augusta’s family, if you think they are major characters, or leave them out of the query entirely. Why does Augusta’s family need Griffin’s protection? The rest of this paragraph tells me you understand that writing a query is the art of leaving things out, but there is a fine line between successfully telling us only the need-to-know, and just confusing us.

Ask yourself what you really need in this paragraph for us to understand the main story, here. For example, do we need to know exactly what Griffin may have done wrong, or just simply that he may have done wrong?

Stuck in the narrow, unaccompanied middle between clutching governmental control and the radical members of an opposition group, the decision to stay neutral may be fatal – and ultimately impossible.

Whoa. Clutching governmental control? Radical opposition group? Is this is same query? Neutral would indicate there were opposing sides to some conflict–what conflict? Focusing on the threats (what threats?) around her, Augusta attempts to ignore the heightening conflict between her heart’s urging to risk it all for the love of her soul (do you mean she loves her own soul, the love her soul expresses, or possibly Griffin?) and her mind’s persistent encouragement to settle for another. Another what? Is there a character who should have been introduced?

As all of the elements come crashing together like the conflicting fronts of a tornado, Augusta finds that although turmoil and deception are plagues in any age, love always tends to find you right where you belong.

You know, for this sentence to have the punch that you want it to have, it needs to have a set of opposites on either side of the word “although.” So, since plagues don’t keep you from finding where you belong (maybe you belong there, plagued) this sentence didn’t resonate with me. Since it is the closing of your synopsis-portion in this query, I would have liked to be left with something with a better kick. The language in this query–metaphors, etc.–hints that the you’re leaning toward the literary side (women’s fiction sort of straddles commercial fiction, genre fiction and sometimes literary fiction) so I’d like your last sentence to be just a tad more poetic or profound. Also, “always tends” contradicts itself. Always means it doesn’t ever do something else, while tends means it regularly or frequently does something, but not always without deviation.

A Shift in the Wind is 115,000 words and fully complete. I would love to send the manuscript for your review. Thank you for taking the time to consider this project!

This query had no salutation, which won’t earn anybody a rejection. It is a nice formality to say bye-bye, though.

I would reject this query not because I think there isn’t a story here, but because I’m not entirely sure what it is.

 

QueryDice #25

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Ms. Ruth,

Noah Pressman has survived the IRA, the Taliban, and both Gulf Wars. Now the documentary filmmaker faces something far more threatening – old age.

I’m not sure I understand why a filmmaker would have “survived” these. It is not clear that he put himself in the line of danger for the sake of his films, if that is what you meant to say.

Retirement means he’ll finally have to stop running (from what?) and deal with the traumatic death of his son.

This paragraph seems a bit all-over-the-place. The first sentence hints that Noah has led a dangerous life and it’s about to become even more dangerous. Then we learn he’s older, which tames that first thought a bit. The last sentence hints that he’s running from something, although we don’t know what and that his son died traumatically. How do these elements–the dead son, Noah’s flight from some sort of danger, his impending retirement, the IRA, Taliban and wars, and Noah’s filmmaking relate to each other? What is the focal point that gathers them at some juncture?

Desperate to escape the painful memories, Noah accepts a new job: (Job? I thought he was retiring…) direct a TV show about the most bizarre places in America. When he arrives at the abandoned Fairytale Forest, Noah glimpses a startling apparition of his son – alive, and soon unearths a cryptic message: HIDE THE KIDS.

Again, I’m not sure what Noah’s son has to do with his new job or with the cryptic message. I think the death of his son and his pain regarding that are details better left to a synopsis and the full manuscript.

After discovering video evidence (evidence of what? If you’re referring to the cryptic message, the way in which it was sent is better revealed in the same sentence as the message itself) linking the property to a wave of mysterious child abductions, Noah is determined to unlock the secret buried within the crumbling wonderland.

Why? Why would Noah, who is looking at retirement and is in his old age, be so determined to figure out this mystery? I have an inkling that this is where the death of Noah’s son is important. Was his son a child when he died? Was he abducted? Does he suspect that this is connected to that? We need to know this, because Noah needs to have a very good reason for meddling in things that are none of his business–and seeking closure or revenge for his son’s death is perfect.

Aided by Caleb Rafferty, the teenage host caught in a battle against his own traumatic past, Noah uncovers a satanic plot orchestrated by Professor Dominic Ballard. Obsessed with gaining immortality, Ballard has found the key in ancient Druid lore and its long-forgotten but profound association with Christmas.

By performing a ritual sacrifice on midnight of Christmas Eve, Ballard will trigger the deaths of children everywhere, ensuring himself never-ending life. For Caleb, it means the grave. (Why? How?)

For Noah, it means suffering the unbearable pain of losing a surrogate son.

Surrogate son? You didn’t reveal they were that close. I got the impression they’d just met.

They must stop Ballard before the stroke of midnight, but standing in their way is a sadistic creature with powers of illusion, a creature that has just found some new toys to play with.

You haven’t given us enough information about this creature or its motivations, so we don’t feel the impending doom you wanted us to feel by introducing the creature.

A paranormal thriller, [redacted] is complete at 100,000-words long. It’s my first novel. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best,

[redacted]

I would reject this query because it leaves out important information and it doesn’t tie the elements of the story together in a way that helps me feel the excitement of this thriller. I am concerned this will continue in the manuscript and I’ll wind up reading a thriller that’s not very thrilling.

LR

 

QueryDice #24

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Agent X: (Readers, please note that this author probably wrote “Agent X” just for this exercise. You should always use the agent’s name, as in “Dear Ms. Ruth”.)

Have you ever wondered if parents can love an adopted child as much as “one of their own”? When you first heard the story of the mother who sent her adopted son on a plane back to Russia with a note pinned to his jacket stating she “no longer wished to parent this child,” were you horrified?  Were you empathetic?

I normally abhor questions at the beginning of a query, because you just don’t know what the agent’s internal response is going to be. What if my answer to the first question is, “No. I don’t really care.” In that case, I would read the rest of this query thinking I don’t care about what you have to say. In this case, I just so happened to be intrigued by the questions, but that’s left up to chance. Don’t leave it up to chance.

In Children of My Own: Bringing Borya Home, I bring first-hand perspective to thoughts like these in the tale of the adoption of my 13 year old son, who struggles with Reactive Attachment Disorder (RAD) as well as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Memoir is tough. Unless you’ve been through something no one has ever been through, or that is extremely compelling or extraordinary, a memoir is hard to sell. I’m already thinking about this after this paragraph. Many people write memoirs about their parenting experience, but unless it’s radically different from everyone else’s experience, it won’t be enough. I’m going to keep reading to see if this is different enough. The query itself, though, minus the questions in the beginning, has a good start.

In this 22 chapter (a word-count is good to know, but since we have no idea how long your chapters are, this is not helpful) memoir, readers will first be introduced to Borya in the dusty play yard of an orphanage in Kazakhstan when I was there adopting another child.  (This is interesting because there are not many books set in Kazakhstan) They will learn of the five year quest to find him, adopt him, and bring him home.  They will come to realize, as I have, that there is more to bringing someone home than changing their address.  For children with RAD, bonding and attaching to a family does not come naturally, or easily, and sometimes it never comes at all.  For a parent to love a child without reciprocity can be heartbreaking, and has led to parents disrupting adoptions, abusing their children, and even sending them back on a plane.

I’m mildly interested. I do think this is radically different enough to have potential.

This book describes my initiation into the world of RAD.  There is raw honesty (always awesome, in a memoir) as I share my successes, my failures, my moments of weakness, my fear at thinking that I would not be able to do this.  By weaving a few tales of my own upbringing throughout the book, I hope to give the reader some perspective as to who I am as a person, as another flawed and imperfect parent.

When I searched for books on RAD, I found many titles.  After all, of the roughly one million children adopted annually, more than 10% will present with severe challenges related to RAD, and all prospective adoptive parents are instructed to educate themselves on this frightening “what-if”.   The books I found, however, discuss treatment strategies for RAD, or delineate the ordeal of families who have struggled to come to terms with this disorder, only to end in sadness, with broken hearts and feelings of failure all around.  To my surprise, I found no books that recounted personal tales of success in raising a child with RAD.  My son, who has made so much progress towards becoming a part of our family, tells me I need to write this book so that others can see that it can be done.

Children of My Own has evolved into a book from its origins as a blog.  The blog was begun during the adoption process, but continued once the kids were home so I could share both the comedy and insanity of raising six children while RAD unfolded itself before my eyes.  The blog’s readership has grown to roughly 6,000 per month  and has given hope to many other parents who are also struggling to raise a child with RAD.

Even outside of the adoption community, my story has served as an inspiration to many, and my platform is growing rapidly. In addition to the blog, I have several published essays/articles in the magazines Adoption Today, Adoptive Families, and Country Magazine, as well as two essays published in the book The Foster Parenting Toolbox, published by EMK Press. Through my blog, I have been contacted by an agent from the Magical Elves production company, who expressed interest in doing a segment about our family in an upcoming show.  I have given permission for an adoption counselor to use posts to help educate prospective families.  My blog is also featured periodically on the blog Five of My Own, which receives more than 60,000 hits per month.

Ms. X, I know I will need the guidance of a professional to help polish this manuscript (my first), (so, then you admit to being unpolished? This is risky. Even if you are a newbie, don’t wave that flag) and when I read your bio and saw that you specialize in blog-to-book projects, (it does not say that in my bio. And I don’t. I wonder whose bio you were looking at? Did you just assume?) I had such a strong feeling that you are the person to champion this book.  I look forward to hearing your thoughts and I hope you will see something in my story that you feel is worth telling.

This query is a bit long and rambling. Paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 are fine. The only truly helpful information in paragraphs 5 and 6 are the statistics on how many kids are adopted and how many face RAD-related challenges, the fact that you have a successful blog with an audience (is it 6,000 or 60,000? You’ve used both figures.) and that you have six adopted (?) kids. This information should be concisely incorporated into paragraph 7. The rest can be scrapped without consequence.

All in all, this wasn’t half-bad. And while I think this query rambles a bit, and I have a hunch the rest of the manuscript does too, I would like to request it anyway. This subject matter is compelling to me, and I’m curious to see what the author does with it.

LR

 

QueryDice #23

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Ms. Ruth,

The war started with a drunkard in her library and an arrow in her arm.

The first sentence needs work. I had to read it twice to figure out that you were saying that someone had a drunkard in her home and an arrow in her arm, rather than a drunkard sitting in her own library with an arrow in her arm. Also, I’m wondering how this could possibly start a war.

Seventeen-year-old Adalmund Pratt is one of the last remaining people who can see and weave the threads of magic in her plague-ravaged country, and as such, she is the newly-appointed Advisor to the Theodyn Heir. During a peace treaty signing with the neighboring nation of Amleth, an Amleth advisor drunkenly slurs in her ear that his nation is on the brink of a revolution against the royal family, and she realizes that she and the Heir of Theodyn are in enemy territory.

This paragraph needs some serious work. First, what is the significance of seeing and weaving threads of magic? What benefit or detriment does this lend to Adalmund? Then, some world-building is necessary. What’s a Theodyn Heir? Is the Amleth advisor talking about a revolution against his country’s royal family, or that of Adalmund’s country? What is the significance of that?

The attack comes before they planned. <–You don’t need this sentence. If you want us to know the attack happened without notice, that can be done as an adjective in this next sentence. An unknown division of the Amleth army attacks and it’s an arrow through Adalmund’s shoulder and another through the throat of the Heir, who dies in her arms.

You’ve written that “it’s an arrow through Adalmund’s shoulder and another through the throat of the heir…” What is? Further, why would they attack Adalmund? Her political weight is unclear. We don’t know anything about the heir, either, so we don’t care that he died in her arms, no matter how gruesome his death. We at least need to know his importance to Adalmund if we’re expected to care about this death.

Adalmund knows that her ability remains the only chance to save Theodyn. (How? Why is this the case?)Pushing aside her own grief and feelings of failure, she doesn’t hesitate to obey when the grieving Queen sends her to spy on the Amleth army and bring the murderous army unit to justice.

My intuition tells me the real meat of your story begins with the above sentence. Since the heir dies early, and the attack doesn’t mean much to the rest of Adalmund’s journey, begin with the above sentence, which will give you much more room for world-building.

It’s not an impossible assignment until Adalmund realizes that the soldiers who attacked aren’t a part of the normal army, but are the private guards of a Prince. (What prince? Why does this matter?) The only way she can succeed is to forge a precarious truce with Peace, the mysterious leader (is this the Prince?) of the revolution in Amleth, and she’ll do it to save her country—even if the price of Peace is her life. <–This sentence is confusing. Are you talking about the price of the mysterious leader, or the price of peace?

The first in a planned series, [redacted] is a young adult fantasy novel of 75,000 words.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[redacted]

I would reject this query because the important pieces of the story are not exposed properly, and I worry that will continue in the manuscript. More importantly, though, I would reject it because Adalmund has no internal struggle and doesn’t appear to face the same challenges that teens face. All the conflict is external and I like to see interplay between external and internal conflict in YA. I also know nothing about Adalmund’s personality or that of any other characters, and this is necessary for me to like the characters enough to want to see more of them.

A Valentine’s Day Book Review

Happy Valentine’s Day! And now, a book review about love:

 

Book critic, William Deresiewicz, in The New York Times, wrote that Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot was not about marriage, or even love at all, but like his other novels, was primarily about “the drama of coming of age.” This review was laced with acidic undertones of condescension and a just-below-the-surface but obvious dislike of most of Eugenides’ work. As an aside, I am never completely smitten with an author’s work. There is always something about it that I don’t like. You don’t spend your life criticizing the written word and retain the ability to turn that off. Regardless, I will never write a negative book review. I don’t believe it is helpful to anyone, least of all the author. If I really looked down upon that author’s work, my agenda would be better served to keep mum about the author altogether. The worst review is no review, in my mind.

Anyway, Deresiewicz’s interpretation of this novel was precisely my own…at first. I felt exactly the same way. I’d listened to the audio performance, and after the last words, I looked around at the NJ Turnpike and thought, and? On the surface, this novel is about a trio of college kids who graduate and then try and figure out life, love and opportunity. Nothing actually comes to pass. Nobody appears to make any sort of satisfying transformation. In fact, nobody gets what they want, either. Then, sitting in traffic, I listened to a short, accompanying interview with Eugenides, which I thought would shed some light on what he was trying to do with The Marriage Plot. It ended by the time traffic started moving, leaving the novel unilluminated. I lit a cigarette and wrote off Eugenides, deciding not to read the next book he publishes a decade from now (he writes a book every ten years or so.)

Never before have I found the aftertaste of a novel to be more powerful than the novel itself. In the days that followed my reading of The Marriage Plot, the novel sank into my brain like a slow wave of awareness overcoming me. Bits of it would return and smack me in the face as I looked at love and life around me. Deresiewicz entirely missed the point. This was not a novel about young people finding their way in the world, it was a novel about the consequentiality of love in our time. The marriage plot refers to the structure of a Victorian novel in which marriage was the be-all and end-all. The finality of marriage in that time was what made it so important and so dramatic and so weighty for the characters to get married or to pursue that. It was the ultimate goal of love, a move to secure financial goals, societal goals and familial expectations. The love itself was really sort of secondary. Now, Eugenides subtly but brilliantly asserts in his novel, the consequentiality of our love is not what we do with it, but what it does to us. With marriage stripped of its weight, becoming a sort of romantic, knee-jerk impulse or a strategic financial move, love takes on a life and weight of its own. While love was once a vehicle used to travel to marriage, it is now a vehicle to travel to transformation, which is not a destination or an end-goal at all, but an on-going journey. It’s about the journey, not really where you end up, which is why in Eugenides’ novel, nobody ends up anywhere. They continue their journey.

The novel’s female character, Madeleine, is stifled by her love. She becomes an in-service, overshadowed mistress to her boyfriend, Leonard, who has a significant mental illness. She’s intelligent and beautiful and could probably have any man she wants, yet because she loves Leonard, she installs herself under the crushing weight of the man and his illness. Leonard himself appears to be perfectly healthy in the beginning of the novel, but when he falls in love with Madeleine and realizes that this has an actual affect on him—it changes his behavior, his thoughts, his motivations, his life—he falls into his mental illness and appears to swim about helplessly and almost indulgently in the throes of it, Madeleine’s service to him only bolstering and enabling that illness.

The third character, Mitchell, spends almost the entire novel in love with Madeleine. The very idea of her motivates him to travel around the world, to alter his perception of people and of life and love, and then at the very end, because love is no longer locked into the finality of marriage or the weight of that institution, this changes for Mitchell and, now motivated by the love he used to feel for Madeleine, his journey takes a turn and continues.

The Marriage Plot was a powerful snapshot of what has happened to love, or rather its impact, and the author makes no definite comment about the consequences of that. Like a poet, he seems to prefer to leave his assertions up to interpretation. Its impact still hits me sometimes, as I recall a phrase or a situation and apply it to my own life or those around me.

In the novel, Leonard is a scientist studying yeast cells, which are interesting because they closely resemble human sex cells. During a heated argument with Madeleine, he makes the observation that these yeast cells, when in crisis, immediately separate as a matter of course because it is easier to protect themselves as single cells in the face of crisis. I would have paid full cover price just to let Eugenides drop this one exquisite metaphor on me.

QueryDice #22

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

16-year-old Emory Stone (love the name) has always felt like an outsider. Being part alien, it kind of comes with the territory. (This is a nit-pick, but something about this sentence bothers me. I think it is because the word “being” is actually modifying the word “it.” Because “it” is a pronoun used in place for “the outsider feeling,” this sentence would technically mean that the outsider feeling is an alien. This is overly technical, and I really can’t say with any confidence that other agents would have cared. But my immediate thought was that the writing might not be up to par.) And her weird, extraterrestrial powers— like the sometimes-useful, always-disturbing ability to learn everything about an object just by touching it—don’t make fitting in any easier. (I’m not confident that Emory’s ability to know things would make it difficult for her to fit in. I can stretch my mind to imagine how this might be possible, but the point is you shouldn’t depend on an agent to do this.) If she could understand and control those powers, that would be one thing, but Emory has no idea about her alien ancestry. (Then how does she know she’s an alien? My agent-brain is wondering if this is a plot hole, or if you’re just being concise.) And even if she did, it’s not like they teach “Harnessing Your Alien Powers For Beginners” at Eden Falls High. <–I really love sentences like this one. It’s funny and shows the author’s voice, but it also helps us feel Emory’s problem. Nice job on that.

Unfortunately for Emory, though, there are others in the universe who know all about her ancient, powerful bloodline. They know she is a descendant of the all-knowing Sentient, a godlike creature responsible for the creation of the once utopian planet of Aporia. Since the Sen (what is (or are) the Sen? This is probably short for Sentient, but since this paragraph already feels like you’ve just gone from 0 to 60 in 12 seconds, it’s best not to introduce anything unfamiliar that you don’t have to.) abandoned the Aporians and fled to Earth hundreds of years ago, the planet has been steadily falling into ruin. Now, a group of warriors have shown up on Earth, intent on using Emory to get their paradise back. By the way, I knew after this sentence, that I’d be requesting this. Hello, Flash Moment, long time no see.

Among them is Cael, (again, love the name) who has spent his entire life living in the shadow of his father, the most feared, most respected general in the Alpha Centauri Star System (what is the Alpha Centauri Star System?). Hunting down Emory Stone is his chance to prove himself, to be known as someone other than “the general’s son”. But when the mission takes a deadly twist, Cael ends up owing his life to Emory instead. As the threat to Earth—and Emory—escalates, Cael will have to make a decision: keep fighting for a cause he isn’t sure he believes in anymore, or betray his father and try and keep Emory safe. But even he might not be able to save her from her past, and from the dark family secrets that will threaten the very future of Earth.

Equal turns action, romance, and sci-fi nerdiness, [redacted] is a YA novel of 90,000 words (this is technically just a tad too long for YA, but it made me happy here because this introduces a new world and I expect that since this is so long, the author has spent those words on exposition of that world.), which alternates between Cael and Emory’s POV. It is the first in a planned trilogy, which will chronicle the war for the planets and unravel the mystery of the Sen.

Thanks so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
[redacted]

GIMME, GIMME GIMME!

LR

QueryDice #21

The following is a query critique. Comments, suggestions and discussion are welcome and we hope you join in. I can only offer one opinion. The author of the query and I would love to hear yours.

Dear Ms. Ruth:

Allie and Orson are in the wilds of southern Colorado hiking with their father, when a tragic misstep leaves them alone at the top of the mountain. Two days away from help, they descend to the bottom of the mountain valley in search of their father, Trey. All the while, a black bear watches.

Trey decides to take his 8 and 9 year old on a four-day backpacking trip through southern Colorado. It’s the type of vacation he took with his father when he was their age. The excursion is the beginning of his new life as a full-time dad, and a way to start the kids’ childhood anew.

The kids have shuffled between dilapidated apartments, slept on mattresses strewn on food-stained carpets, been baby-sat at their roach-infested Granny’s house, and have bruises on their backs reflecting the braided belt their mother’s live-in boyfriend used to beat them. When their mother loses custody, they are shuttled off to their weekend Dad.

Trey struggles with his new role, and feels the distance between himself and his children grow every time he raises his voice. Allie feels a sneaking resentment as she increasingly blames her brother for the troubles of their past. Orson sinks under the weight of his insecurities, and in his dreams, relives the savage nighttime battles at his mother’s apartment.

Despite an auspicious beginning, the trip deteriorates on the second day when Orson has a late night accident, and their delayed morning start sends them rushing down the trail to find camp before dusk. The steep grade sends Orson careening down the path out of control, and Trey stops his son’s tumble only to disappear over the mountainside.  

Now, Allie and Orson have to find a way to cope with the cold nights and their dwindling supplies. They have to go off the trail, and into the endless forest. All the while, a black bear is coming.

[redacted] (92,000 words) is literary fiction, and combines the realism of Into the Wild with the epic style of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I am a working writer and educator with an MA in Studies in Literature. [redacted] is informed by some of my experiences working with young victims of physical abuse and neglect, in education and at home.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

[redacted]

 

The biggest accomplishment of your query is that it hints to me the author has talent. Talent’s never enough, though, so I would have been on the fence about requesting more material. On the one hand, I’m curious to see what the author’s prose is like, and whether or not it can make me care about these kids and their dad and, perhaps most importantly, if it can do both of the following:

 

1. Float the emotional, situational and familial issues to the forefront in a graceful way so that avoiding the bear doesn’t become the focal point of this novel, which would pop it out of literary fiction.
2. Make it believable and authentic. The kids need to seem real, especially, which is no easy undertaking. Dialog, tendencies and the mechanics of their minds are limited, and because of that, so is the author.

 

 On the other hand, I might reject this because it didn’t excite me enough. In the first 19 days of this year alone, I have received over 300 queries. Because of this flood—which is, by the way, typical of agents—I have to be meticulously choosey. I’ll reject things that are basically quite good just because I was not as excited as I could have been. Sometimes I suspect that the manuscript is better than the query—as is the case here—but I’ve got tons of other manuscripts to evaluate that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt are good.

What this means for this query, is that it would depend entirely upon my mood at the time whether or not I would request a proposal. Don’t let that happen! You want agents to request more material regardless of mood. You want me to request this even if my boyfriend just dumped me for a supermodel, I suddenly discovered I gained 50 pounds and my kitten just died—right after I realized my kid has chicken pox. In other words, let your story’s clarity define it rather than letting it teeter on the fence.

 

For this agent at least, here’s what would make that happen:

 

This was too synopsis-heavy for me. I do not need paragraphs 2 and 5, for example. All I really need to know are the largest threads: after having his kids dropped into his life full-time, a weekend-dad takes them on a let’s-reconnect nature trip, only to be separated from them by a tragic misstep. The kids are suffering from heavy emotional issues stemming from their mother’s abuse and neglect and are now all alone in the forest trying to find their dad…all the while, a black bear is too close for comfort.

 

Those are the bare bones of your story. Puff them up to about 250 words, focus heavily on the emotions involved and the dangers present, and I would have definitely requested this. Also, I liked your paragraph about yourself. As you suspected, I do, in fact, need to know how your story of abuse and neglect is informed. I was wondering how you expected to make that authentic. That being said, please send me the first three chapters and a detailed synopsis. =)

LR

 

I Just Finished Reading…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Every once in a while, I come across something that’s so unique and interesting as to remind me that not every story has been told. There is still originality left to be discovered. This is why I love YA. Because it still embraces the fantastical, because its main characters are still innocent, but flawed enough for us to like them, because YA fantasy plots start small and then explode in fantastical and strange fits of whimsy and then loop back into themselves absorbing their own initially small plots to leave readers with a sparkle of enjoyment in their eyes.

I’m not a fan of plot summaries, as I think if you could really express the plot aptly, the author would have done so instead of writing the book, so I’ll spare you. But this book had levitating 80-year-old children caught in time warps, a big haunted-y house no one knows about anymore, a terrible secret danger you’d never be able to guess at and an endearing, scared kid who’s just like any other kid…except. All of this was set amongst real, collector’s photographs of peculiar children and strange, haunting scenes. This was unforgettable.