I'm glad to have Laura Heffernan help out today. Laura was my first Query Kombat pick to get an agent this year and it seems right to have her back at the end of the year.
Keep in mind that feedback is subjective by nature. What does and does not catch the eye is going to vary by person. Each writer must weigh the comments they get against their own judgement and make the changes that resonate with them.
The Holiday Query hop is closed. Please make sure you get your 10 critiques done.
The random number generator picks 24!
Dear Agent Awesome,
[First, a
note: Yay! I love Beauty and the Beast re-tellings!]
Sixteen-year-old George Sumerlin has never seen the world outside of the plantation, but he can peek peeks at it through the
slits in the fence. Mama says the islanders would
not wouldn't
understand his bat wings, bull horns, cat’s eyes, or lizard’s tail—the
manifestations of a curse laid on his great-great-great grandfather for
swindling land away from the island’s
locals. They would kill him. [I feel like this last sentence doesn't work for me,
considering how strong the line before it is. It's completely subjective, but
I'd cut that line. The first paragraph of a query is usually for your hook, and
I think the hook is stronger with just the first two sentences.]
When George flies the coop, he learns Mama
isn’t wrong about
the world; it’s
dangerous for a creature like him. [Why? How?
What happens?] The longer he lingers, the more his fledgling
feelings for Grace magnify
his shame over his monstrosities. [What does
this have to do with a dangerous world?] But she knows something
about the Boo Hag that not only will unlock the mysteries of the Sumerlin Curse… it may even present a
way to break it. [I'm torn here, because I
really like this sentence, but I want more concrete stakes. What happens if the
curse isn't broken? Will the townspeople kill him? Will he just go back to his
old life? And if so, what's so bad about that (other than it being lonely)?
Giving the reader an idea of what George has to lose can help make an agent
desperate to move on to the pages.]
Complete
at x, [Take out the comma] words [Add comma] THE SUMERLIN CURSE is a YA
Southern Gothic steeped in the Gullah/ Geechee folklore of the Georgia Sea
Islands. Beauty and the Beast meets The
Brother’s Grimm [No apostrophe] told from the viewpoint of the
monster as a teenage boy. It should appeal to readers of Half Bad and Beware the Wild. [I see
some mixed fonts in this paragraph, but that might be from the PC to Mac
conversion. I'm throwing it out there in case it's in the original.]
I hope you
find these comments helpful. Good luck!
------------------------
Laura writes women’s fiction, represented by Jen Karsbaek at Foreword Literary. She wrote her first "short story" when she was five years old, detailing a family's Saturday morning on their Commodore 64 (it may have somewhat auto-biographical). She’s been writing ever since. In her spare time, she loves playing board games, baking, and binge watching anything by Joss Whedon. She also really likes parenthetical phrases (but not in fiction) and the Oxford comma.
Follow her on Twitter: @LH_Writes
Another comp title, while middle-grade, might be Monstrous by MarcyKate Conolly (the character also has strange parts of herself--lizard arm, etc.). This sounds great and Laura's suggestions are spot on n my opinion. Good luck!
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