[QCrit]: HOME & EVERYWHERE ELSE, LITERARY FICTION, 79K, 1ST ATTEMPT

Hi all,

I started querying about two months ago but of the 21 agents I've queried, I've received 6 form rejections and no MS requests. I know it's tough out there but I feel/felt good about my querying materials and am feeling a bit disheartened. Thought I'd post here and see if you all had some feedback. Thanks in advance for your time.

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Dear AGENT,

I hope this note finds you well. I’m seeking representation for HOME & EVERYWHERE ELSE, a literary fiction novel complete at 79,000 words.

Mina never meant to overstay her visa. She spent a summer backpacking in Europe after college and just never came home. Now, after six years of working in hostels and drifting from city to city, Mina finds herself face-to-face with an immigration officer asking to see her documents. In short order, she’s on a flight home to Tucson to face the life she deserted.

The problem is that life has moved on without Mina: her sister has had a baby, her mother has become obsessed with cooking food from her Serbian homeland, her father’s hoarding has spiraled out of control, and her friends are all settled with partners, jobs, and homes…everything Mina doesn’t have.

Against the backdrop of a hometown she both deeply loves and in equal measure feels contempt for, Mina must figure out what it means to belong, to a place and to a family. Ultimately, she is forced to reckon with the things that caused her to flee and decide if she will again leave Tucson to forge a path away from her loved ones, or if she’s ready this time to put down roots and do what it takes to stay.

HOME & EVERYWHERE ELSE is a coming-of-age story featuring an adrift protagonist who must absorb her life shocks and find a new path reminiscent of WRITERS & LOVERS, as well as the wry humor and overly-entangled dynamics of a multicultural family found in GRETA & VALDIN.

[BIO]

Given your [PERSONALIZED REASON HERE], I thought you would be a great fit for HOME & EVERYWHERE ELSE. The first TK pages are attached.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Best,

[NAME]

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FIRST 300:

There was a Tucson that existed in Mina’s mind. It had buildings in shades of purple and pink, colors she’d never seen on a single exterior wall in Europe, not for the whole six years she’d been there, away from her hometown. There were cacti and wildflowers and the sky was a perpetual shade of bright blue. Sure, it was hot – a dry heat, she was naturally quick to say – but any resulting discomfort was more than offset by the knowing that at dusk, the distant howls of coyotes could sweep across the city. All that wild desert life.

The Tucson Mina saw outside her airplane window however – flying into the city for the first time in over six years – was brown. The whole city tinged with a brown filter, as though there was a flyscreen in front of it.

It was just so, so brown.

The dread in Mina’s stomach climbed to her throat. She tried to swallow, wishing she’d slurped up the last of the tepid white wine still lingering at the bottom of her flimsy plastic cup when the flight attendants had, just moments earlier, come through the aisle with their garbage bags. She wished she hadn’t cared about the indignity of hunting for every last drop of that $7 wine.

Had Tucson always been this brown?

For the past six years, Mina had been arriving into European cities she’d never visited before, the sights from inside those many train carriages completely novel to her. Even Belgrade, where she’d regularly stayed with her aunt Rada, never took on the kind of inescapable knowingness Mina felt flying into Tucson.

She tried to sink into the seat but it was so staunchly upright she wasn’t convinced they’d taken the natural curvature of the human spine into design consideration.