Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.
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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
IT SHOULD’VE BEEN YOU is an 88,000-word standalone women’s fiction novel that will appeal to fans of the star-crossed lovers trope in What You Wish For by Katherine Center and the trauma-driven, dual-timeline structure of The Forgotten Hours by Katrin Schumann. Good start, it sounds like you've got the formula for an opening paragraph down.
Twenty-five-year-old Aurora Ridgefield is perfectly content checking off the boxes of a well-planned life: a teaching career, an apartment, her devoted boyfriend, Sage. But she also knows she’s no longer the wild, open-hearted teen she used to be—not like she was with Gale, the boy who saw her in a way no one else ever had. When she unearths an old journal, she’s forced to confront a truth she’s long tried to forget: she never really got over him. Great beginning here!
At fifteen, their connection is immediate, electric. But before it can become something more, Gale’s parents ship him off to a remote boarding school. Unable to process the sudden loss, Aurora’s free spirit hardens into control. Little bit more here on why? Why is this the reaction? It almost seems like a wild person make spin out of control instead.
Over the years, fate keeps reuniting them—but each time, Gale returns more withdrawn. Finally, he confesses what he’s carried for years: the school didn’t just take him away—it broke him. Loving her only reminds him of everything he’s lost, of the trauma he endured—so she lets him go. The way this para is written it feels like the "over the years" statement spans the time all the way up to the present, and their adulthood, which the next paragraph seems to contradict
A decade later, Aurora has everything she thought she wanted: a marriage to Sage, a child after years of infertility, a comfortable life. But the journal leads her to a crossroads—continue the life she’s carefully built, or give her love with Gale the chance it never had.
When she agrees to meet Gale one last time, her decision becomes clear: she tells him she has always loved him, even when he couldn’t love himself; but their story is in the past ---and she is choosing her present. This is more like a synopsis at this point, you're giving away the end. The query needs to be more hook-y, and make the reader / agent want to know what happens. You need to cut this off at her making the choice, or being stuck at the crossroads, rather than come across with the whole ending.
By day, I’m a high school English teacher and New Jersey Romance Writers member, living in New Jersey. I hold degrees in journalism, English, and secondary education. This is my debut fiction novel. Great bio, you don't need to mention that it's your debut, with no pub credits it's an assumed.