Genre: YA paranormal
Pitch:
The week Becca Sanchez discovers Uncle Don is a total whack-job begins with a moving van and ends in handcuffs. First, her creepy history teacher moves in next door. And then her uncle tries to stake him. That’s right, stake. As in vampire.
But when a student goes missing, Becca starts to wonder if maybe crazy Uncle Don isn’t so crazy after all. She investigates and finds a freezer full of blood bags in the teacher’s basement. She and her uncle team up to stop him before he turns the Halloween Dance into his personal high school buffet line.
Everything is going to plan … until she discovers proof her teacher isn’t a vampire after all. Because that’s ridiculous. This is real life, and vampires aren’t real. But now Becca has to save her least favorite person from a stake to the chest and her uncle from sixty to life.
First sentence:
“Whoa, do you see that? Someone’s moving into the haunted house.”
But when a student goes missing, Becca starts to wonder if maybe crazy Uncle Don isn’t so crazy after all. She investigates and finds a freezer full of blood bags in the teacher’s basement. She and her uncle team up to stop him before he turns the Halloween Dance into his personal high school buffet line.
Everything is going to plan … until she discovers proof her teacher isn’t a vampire after all. Because that’s ridiculous. This is real life, and vampires aren’t real. But now Becca has to save her least favorite person from a stake to the chest and her uncle from sixty to life.
First sentence:
“Whoa, do you see that? Someone’s moving into the haunted house.”
Nothing wrong with the pitch. Nice and tight. I do, however, find the title odd. Very weird to have a title of a book named after someone who is not only not the MC, but the MC's uncle.
ReplyDeleteGood luck.
Voice is very strong--love it! I think the storyline has lots of audience appeal, too. But the pitch needs just a touch of smoothing to make each line flow smoothly into the next, raising stakes along the way. The ending where there's a reversal (going from believing the teacher is a vamp to knowing he's not) kind of jerked me out a bit. Reversals are challenging, because you have to get the reader to invest in why the character thinks X, but you have to make it a smooth transition to the reveal that she was mistaken and Y is actually true instead. I think it might be better to show what the proof Becca finds that gets him off the hook, or make the pitch end on an ambiguous note on purpose: is the teacher a vamp, or is her uncle about to commit murder? and use that to compel the agent into requesting to find out.
ReplyDeleteGood luck!
I think condensing the first para into a single hook sentence might make this more powerful. Don't get me wrong, I think the first line is very hooky as is, but it could be tighter overall, so play with it a bit and see if you can do more with less.