Keep the Good Parts
1. Emily Ryder finds a magic diary that allows her to edit her memories. The question is, which memories are better to keep? All her stupid mistakes so she doesn't make them again? Or only the good ones so she can forget how stupid she's been?
2. When Aurora's heavy drinking drifter boyfriend leaves her for a life hopping freight trains across the country, she should be relieved, but she only remembers the good parts: streetwalking, defacing public property . . . Hmm. Okay, there was their pet ferret.
3. Cassie invites her (soon-to-be-ex-) boyfriend, Scott, home to meet her parents. When her mom puts the platter of fried chicken on the table, he immediately grabs all the thighs and drumsticks. (her dad's favorite parts). Not only that, he puts two drumsticks in his pocket, saying he's keeping them for later.
4. Harold receives a rejection slip from an agent, that says: Keep the good parts. He writes back: You didn't say which were the good parts. The agent writes to him: I underlined the good parts. Harold responds: You didn't underline any . . . Oh.
Original Version
I am seeking representation for KEEP THE GOOD PARTS, a dual-POV upmarket contemporary fiction complete at 98,000 words. It will appeal to readers of Claire Daverley’s Talking at Night, Hanna Halperin’s I Could Live Here Forever, and Sally Rooney’s Normal People.
Two weeks before she meets Caden in a Seattle coffee shop, Aurora nearly drowns in the Pacific Ocean. She drags herself back to shore with a new conviction: she will stop living small. She has spent eighteen years as the good daughter with perfect grades, a future mapped by everyone except her, a life built on safe choices. [Safe choices like swimming alone in the Pacific Ocean.] [I don't wanna die and be remembered as a good daughter with perfect grades, I wanna be remembered as Lara Croft, tomb raider.] [Hard to believe her future has been mapped by everyone except her. Most people can barely map their own future, much less someone else's.] [Two weeks since she decided to stop living small, and she's now in Seattle working as a barista.]
Caden is anything but safe. He’s nineteen, ran away from home senior year of high school, and has been drifting ever since. He carries trauma from a troubled childhood, drinks too much, [There's unsafe, and then there's Bluto Blutarski unsafe.] loves too hard, and sees the hungry, unguarded girl Aurora is finally ready to be. For six months, they build a world that belongs only to them: late walks through sleeping streets, graffiti under bridges, a ferret named Noodle, whispered plans for a quiet life by the sea. [She already had a quiet life by the sea. Can you come up with a better list of what's appealing about this new world they built? Because it sounds like they're both living small.] He makes her feel alive. She makes him want to stop running.
When Aurora loses her scholarship from her expensive private university, [Standard procedure. They only want you around if you agree to let them map your future.] she returns to her small coastal hometown to regroup before transferring to a state school in the fall. Caden promises to follow. [And he's the kind of guy who never breaks a promise.] But without Aurora, he drinks constantly, loses his job, [Job? Someone actually hired this guy?] and becomes certain of what he’s always feared: he will only drag her down. He writes her a letter full of love, lets her go, then vanishes. [WHAT?! I'm shocked.] He hitchhikes to Portland, where a fellow drifter introduces him to train hopping. Chasing freedom, he catches freight trains across America, sinking deeper into addiction with every mile [, while she goes on to become the governor of California. But she still longs for the good parts of what they had together].
Told across seven years, KEEP THE GOOD PARTS follows two people bound by a first love neither can release, through the cities and lovers and near-misses that keep pulling them back to each other, and what happens when they finally find their way home.
Notes
When you say this hard-drinking, hard-loving guy sees Aurora as unguarded, I get a different vibe than what I think you're after. Like he sees her as his next project, someone he can control.
If Caden was sinking deeper into addiction with each mile, he'd have been dead by the time he reached Wyoming.
Your plot summary covers about eight months of the seven years the book covers. We don't need the whole story in the query, but you stop when she's going back to school and he vanished to go find freedom. If 80% of the book is about cities and lovers and near-misses that keep pulling them back to each other, that deserves mention in the summary, not just one sentence in your closing.
How do they even stay in touch? Does he steal someone's phone and text her that he's in Pittsburgh and he found a bridge that's in need of graffiti, and she then drops everything and hops a freight train to Pittsburgh?
You chose good comp titles. Based on their publishers' descriptions, they all have the same plot as your book.
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