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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.
When a severed arm washes up on shore of Cormorant's Roost, other island residents blame sharks. Mira knows it was no shark, but a monster with fangs and scales who killed to save her. I like it, but some clarification might be needed. Did the monster kill the owner of this arm to save her? Or was this a separate incident?
Years later, because you are unsure of whether this is YA or not, we need clarification on her age here Mira overcomes the fear that kept her away from the ocean to rescue an orphaned sea otter pup. She re-encounters the creature, a telepathic sea monster who is trapped in exile from his South Pacific home and calls himself Bardo. Her fear turns to wonder--Bardo is intelligent, majestic, and he only kills and eats those who deserve it. Some explanation here of what that looks like - examples, maybe, of those he has killed. This could easily be a sliding scale. Bardo is thrilled that his years of solitude are over, and Mira feels powerful by association with the predator.
Bardo is nearly discovered when Calder, a summer resident on his sailboat, finds Mira in the sea miles from shore and “rescues” her. From what? Is she in danger of drowning? In danger from Bardo? Mira finds Calder entitled and arrogant, but he starts to erode the seawall around her heart. How, if she finds him entitled and arrogant? Meanwhile, the body count on the island grows, again, who is he killing? Just bad people? How bad? along with suspicions about what’s in the water. Mira is desperate to help Bardo return home before he is captured or killed, but she can’t do it alone. She must decide whether she can trust Calder with her secret.
DRAWN ONWARD is Adult Magical Realism with YA crossover appeal, complete at 79,000 words. It features the fight for survival despite parental abuse and isolation Wait, what? How does parental abuse fit into this story? Isolation? found in Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone with the hint of magic in the contemporary world found in The Shape of Water.
I think this sounds like a ton of fun, and if Mira is an adult for the majority of the manuscript, then this is an adult novel. The sudden dropping of parental abuse at the end needs to be drawn into the query as a whole. Is this indicative of how Bardo saved her when she was younger? What happened? How did that affect the rest of Mira's life? Why does she have seawalls around her heart? What is this isolation? Personal and priviate, or of the setting in general? How can there be a connection between Mira and Calder when the only characteristics we have for him here are extremely negative? Overall, I think this sounds like a cool idea, and like it could have some great themes - they just need to be included in the query.