Click Here to read the original query.
Dear X,
Since she was twelve, Amelia’s nights have been plagued with visits from monsters. Each night they would terrorize her through the darkness of her closet, calling her Amelie and telling her that they’ve been waiting for her. No matter how many times she turned them away, they would return, angrier and more violent than before. And they followed her no matter where she went.
Now fourteen, Amelia is getting a fresh start in a brand new home in a gated community. Sadly, not even the gates can protect Amelia from her deepest fears. When her cousin Lily comes to visit, the monsters return and steal Lily in the middle of the night. With Lily’s life in danger, Amelia must face her fears and enter the monsters’ world to rescue her cousin. But with each step into their world, Amelia discovers a tangled past that connects her to their world and the one they call Amelie.
AMELIA’S MONSTERS is a 90,000 word young adult fantasy.
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5 comments:
Congrats on the updates! I think this sounds much tighter and more appealing. The original version had me a little confused at times and I had to re-read some things.
This is much more concise and I see the conflict right away. I'm much more interested in reading the book based on this query than the original.
One suggestion - the line "... the monsters return and steal Lily away in the middle of the night." is a little awkward. Perhaps ending it with "steal Lily away."? Just a thought.
Good luck!
I'm actually starting to get curious about what happens to Amelia. So I guess that says something good about the query.
Good job on the rewrite! If I picked up a book with that on the back cover I would want to know more.
This is definitely an improvement, but it still doesn't address some questions for me about the story itself. I know this is off topic, but I think it will help your query. So here goes:
1. If this has been happening for two years, why would this girl continue to live in a bedroom that even has a closet? And if the parents understand enough to know that there is a threat to her--enough to live in a gated community, for instance--why would they even allow visitors at night?
2. You say the monsters are increasingly violent, but all I'm reading is that they call to her through the closet. Is there more happening here?
3. What is happening to make events escalate so suddenly after two years of being harrassed?
What I guess I'm basically suggesting is that you might want to rethink the timeline, so that the awareness of danger and Lily's kidnapping are more closely linked. Maybe Amelia is a completely normal fourteen year old until she moves to her brand-spanking-new home--the one that somehow fills her with dread. Then she has a few nights of the monsters calling to her, but attributes to the stress of the move. Yet we, as the reader, understand it to be more ominous by the clues that the monsters are real and not confined to the closet. Then the cousin arrives, before Amelia puts it all together and,bam! She's forced into an alternate universe.
Anyway, keep going. Just wanted to give you some ideas.
I can see more tension in it now, and it sounds less childish and more teenish. For some reason when I hear monsters I think of Sully on Monster's Inc, unless something is there to make me scared. It still worries me a tad about YA. They say th MC should be two years older than your target audience. YA to me is 14 to 18 and up.
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