BLOG HOP: My Name Isn't Katie (Query+250)

GENRE: contemporary magical realism

WORD COUNT: still editing/revising, don't want to make promises. Somewhere around 60-70K max.

Note: my bio paragraph is missing because it's the signature for my emails. Also missing is my "why I'm querying you" paragraph, because this is highly individual depending on the agent.
 

QUERY

"The Tale of the Bamboo-Cutter's Daughter" meets FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC in this 60,000-word novel about a young woman locked away from the world who claims to be a magical princess from an ancient Japanese fairytale.

Katie has been trying to escape the refurbished attic of her house for over six years. Her parents have installed bars on her single window and deadbolts on the outside of the door. She has no computer, no television, and no phone; a walkie-talkie is her only way to communicate with the outside world. Her only sources of comfort are dancing to her iPod, her carefully hidden collection of old Polaroids, and reading. Her parents, the social workers, and her psychiatrist all say she's there for her own good. That this way she doesn't have to be institutionalized. That her delusions are growing worse.

But Katie knows she isn't crazy. She knows she came from hundreds of years in the past, from a magical city on the moon, and that she was found inside a bamboo stalk when she was a baby. She knows she's really Princess Kaguya and that Jade the Moon Rabbit, her best friend and faithful servant, is searching for her. She knows that a terrible darkness from the past is coming to their small Alaskan town, bringing with it something terrible Katie can't bring herself to remember. And she knows she has until her seventeenth birthday to escape her prison, or she'll be trapped on earth forever.

Then she sees a boy named Mark through her window. Katie claims he can turn into a fox and control the dead. That Mark is her long-lost love from centuries ago. Her heart says they belong together and they're running out of time until the window home closes for good. But with no sign of Jade and a sympathetic but adamant Mark denying he's ever met Katie, she begins to doubt. The darkness is coming, Katie's desperation is growing, and as her seventeenth birthday rapidly approaches, the truth will finally come out—is she really Princess Kaguya? Or is her past all a delusion?

Using prose, verse, Japanese poetry, annotated interview transcripts, pictures, playlists, and Japanese folklore, MY NAME ISN'T KATIE tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who might be an alien princess trapped in a sinister mind-game...or who may simply be a deeply psychologically disturbed young woman.

FIRST 250(ish)

6 days, 12 hours, 41 minutes

They've let me in the downstairs bathroom because I cut my arm on a nail sticking out of my prison bedroom wall. The woman who claims to be my mom needs more room to stitch me up than she can find upstairs. The attic is large but the attic bathroom is small. The light isn't good, either.

I watch the moon through the tiny bathroom window. A sliver of white, a soft glow against black and the stars, so many stars. Is this the edge of the world? They're so clear. Like diamonds.

They don't twinkle. Only in sick cities do stars twinkle, their light battering futilely against the smog. There's no smog here at the edge of everything. No poisonous air. Only me and the people who say they are my parents but they're lying, no I can't think like that, don't think and this prison this house and the attic and the stars so bright you could read by their glow and the light of the moon.

They won't let me read for a long time after this. Not until they figure out if I did this to myself on purpose this is an accident. If something I read gave me the idea to use my pain as the key to escaping made me hurt myself.

Or maybe they think I'm trying to call him but this is all wrong. He doesn't want blood and a dying heartbeat, he is soft things, sweet things. Frost and snowflakes and winter and death, yes, but mourning. Passing. Moving on. Not pain and hurt. They don't know him, they don't understand he can't find me yet because there's something wrong here. I think this is a trap.

I think my parents are trying to kill him. 

But you can't kill Death. There will always be Death.