SVS Agent Round 7: I AM BECOME ANNABELLE, MG Fantasy

Title: I AM BECOME ANNABELLE
Genre: Middle Grade Fantasy
Word Count: 34,000

Is Your Main Character hot or cold?

Annabelle is cold. Given all she’s been through at such a young age, and the secrets she now keeps, she handles things coolly and calmly.

Query:

Annabelle Parker’s parents are not dead. Everyone thinks they are, that she’s in the club with Harry Potter and Batman, but they needn’t purchase her jacket just yet. Her parents are stuck in a painting, and she’s determined to find the right one and let them out.

Annabelle is pretty sure she has the situation under control. She’s twelve now, and she’s conquered the Portland MAX train and put up with her hippie grandpa, so she can do anything. In the two years since Annabelle’s parents disappeared, she’s released the inhabitants of sixty-three paintings. Her sixty-fourth happens to be Devi Ghosh, a thirteen-year-old girl from Mumbai who wants nothing more than to get back in the painting Annabelle has taken her out of.

The girls must work together, though all they have to go on is Annabelle’s fractured memory of the night her parents disappeared. There is a connection between their families and the Portland Art Museum; Annabelle has to find it, or she won’t ever see her parents again.

I AM BECOME ANNABELLE, complete at 34,000 words, is a MG fantasy novel about accidental and reluctant sisterhood, the Saturday flea market, and Hindu mythology. It is the first in a planned series.

First 250 words:

My name is Annabelle Parker, and I have let a lot of things into this world that don’t belong here.

I always hoped for the best, of course, but I had no way of knowing what would come from any given painting. I’ve released pirates and pandas, Venus Fly-Traps and a velociraptor. Yeah, once, a velociraptor. It went on a rampage and ate four chickens before being impaled.

Even the dinosaur was better than a lot of things. I once let out a dragon. It was the size of a housecat and had a cold. I haven’t seen it since, but I figure it can’t be terrorizing the world too much or I’d have heard about it by now.

In two years, I’d found sixty-three paintings. I’d released people, animals, and things I called “other”. Like this one thing made of light that burned me when I touched it. I was glad to see it go, honestly.

Now I walked along the Willamette river, looking for the best spot. The spot where I was least likely to be spotted. I’d taken the MAX train as far as I could, to the Old Town Chinatown stop. The painting of a boat had taken up an entire seat next to me, but at right before five in the morning, no one cared. I only saw one other person on the train, and it’s an unspoken Portland rule that you leave people on the MAX alone if it’s before six in the morning.