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Guess the Plot

Lujain

1. A simple shopping trip becomes a fight for survival when terrorists take over the local big box store. And then the elves arrive.

2, Archaeologist Rebecca has searched for the lost city of Lujain for years. So did previous generations in her family. Her exploits in India involve con artists, a Pakistani spy, and a determined white cow.

3. A woman discovers alchemy and accidentally transmutes her blood to gold. She dies very quickly and her heirs fight over who inherits the corpse, which is more valuable than the rest of her estate.

4. Lujain, her parents, and 15 other immigrants are labeled by the current administration as Palestinian terrorist sympathizers and are deported on a boat to El Salvador, but before they arrive, armed men board the boat and kill everyone except Lujain, leaving her adrift in the Pacific with no food or water. She survives for months thanks to a helpful dolphin.

Original Version

Dear Evil Editor,

"LUJAIN is a 92,000-word literary novel that combines the isolated survival narrative of Yann Martel's 'Life of Pi' with the political urgency of Héctor Tobar's 'The Last Great Road Bum' and the lyrical exploration of identity found in Yaa Gyasi's 'Transcendent Kingdom'"

When fifteen-year-old Lujain Al-Masri witnesses her father, a respected Palestinian-American dentist, arrested for allegedly killing a police officer at a protest, her orderly Philadelphia life implodes.

Despite his pleas of innocence, a viral video appears damning. The administration, eager to make an example, strips him of his citizenship and targets his family under a controversial executive order against “homegrown criminals.” [Nothing like this could ever happen in real life.] 

With the stroke of a pen, Lujain and her mother are labeled as “terrorist sympathizers and a threat to national security.” They are summarily deported to El Salvador—a country they’ve never set foot in and have no connections to. [Either you wrote this 92,000-word novel in the past month, or you're remarkably prescient.] Their unexpected journey takes a deadly turn when armed men board their vessel, leaving Lujain the sole survivor, adrift on the vast Pacific Ocean with no food, water, or means of communication. Just when all hope seems lost, Lujain forms an unexpected bond with a curious bottlenose dolphin she names Najma. 

Their connection becomes her lifeline through months lost at sea. With dwindling resources [Dwindling? She had no food and water to begin with.] and mounting injuries, Lujain clings to one purpose: surviving to expose the truth—that the murder of her mother and 14 others was not a simple robbery gone wrong. It was an assassination. That her family was targeted not for a crime, but for their voice. 

Thank you for your consideration.

Notes

If you get deported from Philadelphia to El Salvador, you're traveling by plane. Including a layover, it wouldn't take more than half a day. To make the trip by boat would take more than a week, and would be costly and dangerous. Thus we must assume they went by boat to make them vulnerable to the killers, who were also sent by the government. It seems unlikely the government would okay the killing of the crew of the boat they used to transport the deportees, but who knows?

If the government sent the killers, it's unlikely they would wait till the boat was in the Pacific to attack it. The Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico America have vast convenient areas. Once they're in the Pacific after going through the Panama Canal, the route to El Salvador is right up the the coast of Central America, not through the middle of the Pacific. 

Also, your vessel wouldn't be a rowboat, it would have an engine, and built-in means of communication that the attackers wouldn't bother destroying, as they think everyone on board is dead. I'm surprised the killers didn't set the boat on fire and sink it to get rid of evidence.

A boat that carries that many passengers in the ocean should have a lifeboat. Lujain should get in the lifeboat and tell Najda to tow her to land, preferably in Costa Rica or anywhere other than El Salvador.

Most of this may be satisfactorily dealt with in your book, but if the agent you write to wonders whether you could possibly manage to make it all work, she may assume you don't. Maybe they should go by plane, and it crashes in the jungle and Lujain is the sole survivor, and she's befriended by a toucan.