Query critique 9/14/23

[Nathan Bransford]

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 Ms Barer,

After reading (and loving) LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, I was thrilled to learn that you're interested in representing a diversity of voices from around the world. May I thus invite you into the world of THE SCATTERLINGS, an adult historical novel based on the barely-known racial Rhodesia Bush War (1966-79) that led to the independence of Zimbabwe in southern Africa? Complete at 99.500 words, THE SCATTERLINGS is recounted in alternating first person POVS of a black female guerrilla/nurse and a White soldier of the Rhodesian Security Forces who meet and marry in London without knowing of the other's wartime background and how they were personally involved.

Providing for her large family is more crucial to 21-year-old MAUDE KHUMALO than a call to arms in Rhodesia’s racial conflict. But when in 1978, she witnesses her 18-year-old sister NOMPILO, succumb to shrapnel injuries after a grenade attack on a Bulawayo disco, Maude joins guerrilla forces fighting the White minority apartheid regime.

In a Zambian camp of hostile comrades, Maude balances military training with her nursing skills, finding solace in the arms of the Camp Commander. After four years of warfare and the death of her lover from an air raid, she returns with their infant to an independent Rhodesia renamed Zimbabwe. Disillusioned with the new partisan politics and covert genocide on her tribe, she migrates with her daughter to England.

In London in 2000, 43-year-old Maude marries 42-year-old BRADFORD PETERSON who tried but could not avoid the mandatory draft for White boys post-high school in 1975 Rhodesia-finally escaping the army in 1979. With their baby on the way, Bradford unintentionally reveals a stinging memory that demands a reckoning with the past. Suspecting him responsible for her sister’s death, Maude investigates-only to be confronted with atrocities that she, in turn, wreaked on his family during the war.

Now they must decide what their future will be. Together or not? Is forgiveness possible?

THE SCATTERLINGS is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Mark Sullivan’s BENEATH A SCARLET SKY, NoViolet Bulawayo’s GLORY and will also appeal to fans of Mandy Robotham’s THE RESISTANCE GIRL and Abdulrazak Gernah's AFTER LIVES.

At the height of the Rhodesia Bush War (1974-79), I was a trainee nurse and privy to the atrocities of the security forces and guerrillas on civilians. I spent the next three decades as a registered nurse in emergency and surgical units in Vienna, Austria, while taking Literature and Literature Crtique as well as creative writing courses with Cambridge's NEC correspondent college and New York's Gotham writers, online and in person. I'm currently researching a thriller based on Zimbabwe's blood diamonds.

As per your guidelines, I have pasted the synopsis and first ten pages of THE SCATTERLINGS.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my work.