Query critique 3/10/22

Offer up your page (or query) for Nathan's critique on the blog.
Post Reply
User avatar
Nathan Bransford
Posts: 1552
Joined: December 4th, 2009, 11:17 pm
Location: Pasadena, CA
Contact:

Query critique 3/10/22

Post by Nathan Bransford » March 7th, 2022, 12:19 pm

Want to see how your editing approach compares to mine?

Below is the query up for critique on the blog on Thursday. Feel free to chime in with comments, create your own redline (please note the "font colour" button above the posting box, which looks like a drop of ink), and otherwise offer feedback. When offering your feedback, please please remember to be polite and constructive. In order to leave a comment you will need to register an account in the Forums, which should be self-explanatory.

I'll be back with my own post on the blog and we'll literally be able to compare notes.

Dear Agent:

Hawks House is about Cherry, a fun, gossipy, and well-educated young woman with a strong voice who, because of her deep love of literature tends to see her own story as a book. By scouring the finest English literature of her time, she finds much-needed inspiration on how best to transition from past to future when the present provides no safe place to stand. Her story kicks off in the intriguing pre-war world of travel, privilege, and responsibilities taking her through the Second World War and a bit beyond. It is set in Canada, America, the Low Countries, England, and finally South Africa.

I am approaching to you because you have a keen interest in women’s literary and commercial fiction. I consider Hawks House (73,000 words, complete) to be a mix of both with, on the one hand, an action-packed plot that tracks Cherry's transformation from wife and mother to a spy, charged with helping to procure industrial diamonds from South Africa for the Allies, and on the other, significant literary references that clearly impact my heroine’s decision-making. I would love to think that my heroine has a similar irrepressible and often sardonic voice not unlike the inspiring historical heroines of Beatriz Williams.

I’m a retired international tax lawyer, astrologer, and ardent student of philosophy, psychology, and literature. I am also an American who has lived and worked in Europe for many years, having finally settled in Oxford. I have formally studied creative writing and English literature at the University of Oxford and it was whilst studying the work of modernist writers like EM Forster and Virginia Woolf, that I first had the idea for my novel.

I very much hope you will enjoy my work and I look forward to hearing from you.

Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 6 guests