[QCrit] Adult Fantasy WILDEST DREAMS (78k) [Attempt #1]

WILDEST DREAMS is a dual-perspective adult fantasy with women's fiction at its heart, complete at 78,000 words. It will appeal to readers of Legends & Lattes for its found-family warmth, The House in the Cerulean Sea for its tender emotional core, and anything by Emily Henry for the way it takes the interior lives of women seriously without taking itself too seriously. It stands alone with series potential. This novel includes neurodivergent representation written by a neurodivergent author.

Willa Crestview has spent twelve years being very good at the wrong things. She's a newly minted vice president, a pending divorcee, and the kind of mother who attends recitals physically but not in spirit. She is also, as of a Tuesday morning in the Flatiron Building lobby, the reluctant sidekick in someone else's fantasy world — specifically, the one her twenty-two-year-old assistant has been writing in secret for years, which has just become terrifyingly real.

Ellie Burton is autistic, brutally honest, and has spent her entire life slightly out of step with the world around her. She coped the only way she knew how: by building a better one. Irisia lives in a decade of notebooks: a queendom with a waiting throne, a villain aunt, a resistance army, and a magic system tied to empathy. It was never supposed to be real. Then her notebook starts glowing in the middle of her first hour on the job, a sorceress in black armor steps through a portal in the lobby, and Willa (who has never made an impulsive decision in her life) shoves the villain sideways and follows Ellie through.

In Irisia, Ellie is the lost princess and Willa is her loyal advisor, a title that would be funny if people weren't actively trying to kill them. Elyria, the aunt who believes the throne was stolen from her, is the kind of villain who doesn't need to invent your worst fears because she can simply find them already living inside you and turn up the volume. She is also (it turns out) not entirely wrong, which makes her considerably harder to defeat. Meanwhile Willa is quietly dismantling the story she's been telling herself about her own life: that absence is the same as presence, that later is always an option, that the people who love you can survive being treated like interruptions indefinitely.

The book alternates between their voices. What holds it together is the relationship — not romantic, but the rarer thing: the kind of friendship where someone sees you before you've decided to let them, and stays anyway. Ellie has spent twenty-two years being told she is too much. Willa has spent just as long not showing up. They are, it turns out, exactly the shape of what the other one needed.

[author bio]

I would be delighted to send the full manuscript at your request! Thank you very much for your time and consideration.