[QCRIT] Adult Fantasy -- WHERE DREAMS BEGIN (107K words, 2nd attempt)
Thanks so much for the comments on my first attempt! The main criticism there was that my query was too vague, so I tried to be more specific about the plot here.
Dear Agent,
I'm excited to share WHERE DREAMS BEGIN, an adult fantasy retelling of Sleeping Beauty.
Thea is putting her children to bed when her world literally collapses, the walls of her home blowing away like dust. In an instant, everything she knows is gone and she is somewhere else, surrounded by strangers who call her by another woman’s name. They tell Thea that she is really Princess Aurelia, cursed by a Fairy to sleep for 100 years until she was saved by True Love’s Kiss. They say anything she thinks she remembers – her husband and children, her home – is a fantasy, conjured up by her own mind as she slept.
Thea doesn’t believe any of this. She is practical, rational. She can cook, navigate through the woods, and treat injuries – skills even Aurelia’s mother must admit her daughter didn’t possess. She knows what’s real and what’s not – or, she thought she did. Because here in the kingdom of Lyramore tea brewed from weeping willow brings a man to tears and all that’s needed to travel from place to place is to step through a mirror, events Thea struggles to accept even as they happen before her eyes. She’s desperate to get back to her family and the small village she left behind, where she never quite fit in but life at least made sense. With the help of a kind prince (who definitely isn’t her True Love), Thea sets out to find the doorway that will bring her back where she belongs. But the longer she’s in Lyramore, the less she can deny the connections between her life and Aurelia’s, and eventually she’s forced to accept the truth: Lyramore is the real world, and everything Thea has ever loved was all just a cursed princess’s dream.
But Thea knows she doesn’t belong in Lyramore either. She can’t make herself fit into the space Aurelia left behind, and she doesn’t want to. She wants her own life back, whether it’s real or not, so there’s only one thing she can do: find the Fairy who cursed Aurelia all those years ago, and make her do it again.
Complete at 107,000 words, WHERE DREAMS BEGIN is a re-imagining of a familiar fairy tale that will appeal to fans of The Summer War by Naomi Novik and A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer*, and to anyone who’s ever thought that Sleeping Beauty’s awakening should be the start of the story rather than the end.
*I realize this title is likely not recent enough (2019), but I'm having a hard time finding more recent (and/or non-YA) portal fantasies that are similar to my book in ways other than just the portal aspect (this one is at least both a portal fantasy and a fairy tale retelling). If anyone has suggestions I'm happy to take them!