Hi! I got some really helpful feedback after submitting my first attempt at a query letter, mostly around the comps not fitting the self-described genre, whether the genre fit at all, and using too much passive language. I also had a recent discussion with an editor at a small press who thought that the hook “psychological aftermath of growing up in Narnia” should be foreground as should my professional identity as a pediatrician, so I rearranged things a bit. Obviously, the Chronicles of Narnia are too big/old/totemic to be a comp, so I’m interested to see if the wardrobe language does the trick.
Here goes:
Dear Agent,
Complete at 102,000 words, FERAL HOPE is upmarket fiction with speculative elements that combines the themes of resilience in the aftermath of trauma of Emma Donoghue's Room and the hopeful solarpunk world building of Becky Chambers's A Psalm for the Wild-Built to ask what happens to the child who enters the wardrobe, grows up inside it, and then is thrust back into our broken world.
In the summer of 1993, Hypolite emerges from the murky waters of Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin. His father’s body and the remote shack where he spent his entire childhood imprisoned are still smoldering, so when the local sheriff finds the burned and starving twelve-year-old boy wandering the nearby marsh, she considers the case closed. But Hypolite is not quite what he appears — hiding within is the mind of an adult who has already lived another life in a world far better than this one.
That world is Serein—an ecological utopia where intelligent animals live in peaceful abundance provided by subtly powerful organic technology. After escaping his father and diving toward a shimmering ring of light beneath the swamp water, Hypolite surfaced in Serein, was adopted by a family of otters, and spent six years healing, growing, and learning for the first time what it means to belong. Then he was thrust back.
Now he must navigate hospitals, foster care, and adolescence on a dairy farm in rural Louisiana while carrying the knowledge that a better world exists and that he has been cast out of it. Scarred by his father's abuse and disgusted by the destructive consumption of the society in which he finds himself, Hypolite is desperate to find his way back to Serein. But Earth refuses to be as terrible as he wants it to be—the foster family who takes him in is genuine and kind, the friendships he forms are real, and the beauty he discovers here is unexpected and inconvenient.
So, when Hypolite finally finds his way back to Serein, he is faced with an unexpectedly difficult choice—to abandon the world of his birth or to return and use his love and knowledge of the wonders of Serein to try to redeem it.
I am a pediatrician whose academic work bridges medicine and storytelling. My narrative essays have appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine. My work in narrative medicine and trauma-informed care informs the psychological authenticity of this novel. FERAL HOPE is my debut.
Thank you for your time and consideration. I would be delighted to send pages at your request.
Sincerely, [Name]