The author of the book featured in Face-Lift 1442 would like feedback on the following revised version of the query:
Dear agent,
I am seeking representation for Phoebe, a literary fiction novel that is 84k words in length.
Phoebe is a second generation Vietnamese-American in 2019 Southern California coping with the melancholy of her late twenties. She finds herself needing to live with her adoptive sister, Gigi, once again, after to a series of regrettable decisions.
For reasons that Phoebe refuses to divulge, she was arrested and dropped out of her PhD program. When Gigi comes to bail her out of jail, Phoebe finds out for the first time that Gigi has been hiding a pregnancy for eight months. The novel follows Phoebe’s court mandated therapy sessions as she’s forced to recount the events of her life which caused her dramatic downfall while Gigi is stuck at home in the minutia of her newfound motherhood. [A bit of specificity would help. What kind of regrettable decisions? What was she arrested for? I would rearrange these paragraphs to:]
Phoebe is a second-generation Vietnamese-American in 2019 Southern California, coping with the melancholy of her late twenties. After being arrested for prostitution/drunk driving, Phoebe drops out of her PhD program and reluctantly moves in with her adoptive sister, Gigi, who is eight months pregnant.
The novel follows Phoebe's court-mandated therapy sessions as she’s forced to recount the events of her life which caused her dramatic downfall, while Gigi is stuck at home in the minutia of her newfound motherhood.
As Phoebe unravels the shame and guilt of her past, she becomes lost in her traumatic memories, unable to discern the difference between the choices she made and the parts of her life which were impacted by her mother’s abandonment and an unsettling betrayal from a childhood friend. The [one] reality she is certain of, however, is that her tenuous living situation can’t last, especially not with whatever else that [while] Gigi is still clearly hiding [something] from her.
Phoebe is a story that explores the experiences of first-born immigrant daughters as they walk the tightrope between familial obligation and their own desires while at the same time navigating the ill defined transition from girlhood to womanhood. It is also about the complexities of female friendship and what it means to have a difficult love for another person.
There is nothing currently on the market just like Phoebe, but it would sit on readers’ shelves somewhere between Milk Fed by Melissa Broder, for its dreamy, sexual prose and psychological musings, and Banyan Moon by Thao Thai, for its reflection on strained relationships between mothers and daughters. If Phoebe were a tiktok, it would be a video of a girl’s exhausted face overlayed [overlaid] with relatable text and a song from Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTS album playing in the background.
Thank you for your consideration.
Notes
Better than the previous incarnation. It's not clear if Phoebe can't live with Gigi only because Gigi is hiding something. Many people manage to live together successfully without revealing all their secrets.
You're still not italicizing book titles.
Hyphen between two words combined to create one adjective (second-generation, court-mandated, ill-defined)
4 comments:
Hey author,
The query letter is not the place to hide the details of the plot. Specifics are much better at getting agents interested. You can spill everything except the ending.
You don't need to state the obvious, that you're seeking representation. Housekeeping details (i.e. word count) are usually better placed at the end, but see if the agent has a preference. Also, you might want to combine/condense those details and the last 2 paragraphs into one much shorter para. It's usually better to describe what's happening in a way that shows what the story is about rather than to say it explores xxx and is about yyy.
You might want to rearrange the sentence that starts "The novel follows" to remove that phrase and so keep the focus on what plot exists.
Hope this helps,
Good Luck
this is the author! Sorry, I think the title italics got lost when I copy and pasted to the email. Thank you so much for the feedback!
Ah, if that is caused at your end, it could be a problem if an agent requests a number of chapters or pages, not attached, and you use a lot of italics. Possibly underlining would survive email, which is ok for titles, but might be annoying if you have lengthy passages you've italicized.
Of course, the problem may be at my end, my email doesn't like your italics. You could try sending an experimental email to a friend (or yourself?) to see if italics survive.
This seems to read more like a synopsis. I'm not feeling the personalities or emotions of these characters in the query and stories like these need to come alive with vibrant personalities. People read these books to feel a human connection and cheer for the characters, hoping they'll pull through with a happy ending.
I'd focus on bringing these characters to life in the query! We need to know their secrets and smell their dirty laundry.
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