Query - WHERE THE DOVES FLY

Dear Agent:

Anna Markowicz is mute, yet she has mastered still life painting as a style and personalized it to fit her own hand. In 1965, at seventeen years of age, she desires to let her fingers dance freely across the canvasses forever. However, not only does the Communist regime in Poland prohibit artists from pursuing their creative expression, it does nothing to protect her from her father’s abuse. When she meets Rafal, a fellow artist from school, he probes at her weaknesses until she is naively pulled into the promises of escape and chooses to travel with him to London. There she participates in an intenvise painting program, undergoes a culturally unacceptable affair with an Iranian, and begins to lose her mind due to the irregular contact with those around her. Unable to speak and having fallen out of love, Anna chooses between remaining a victim and making one final jump of hope, a jump that lands her in America where her spiral out of sanity cements with suicide.

In 2009, Fatemah Essa, Ania’s illegitimate daughter, has developed superior abilities at conceptual and abstract painting. Those abilities have provided enough satisfaction for her to avoid the Twin Cities social scene. When she stumbles upon sketches and letters from her mother’s past, she is forced to undertake her greatest challenge alone: to uncover why her father has lied about her mother’s death and to determine to which extreme she can take her own love of art.

WHERE THE DOVES FLY is a 94,000-word YA novel that explores, in a dual POV, the lives of two women struggling to find themselves artistically in radically different worlds. The novel examines contemporary Polish and Minnesotan history and holds a touch of romance.

I’m a high school junior born 100% Polish but currently residing in the U.S. My short stories, poetry, and essays have appeared in mutliple Creative Communications publications, Alive Magazine, Teen Ink, and others. In 2003, I also self-published a short fiction manuscript, entitled “Allie’s Journey.”

I would be pleased to send you a partial or full manuscript of WHERE THE DOVES FLY.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Author

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