Revised Query

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to comment on my query during Michelle Hauck's and Amy Trueblood's blog hop. The hop is still open for another day, so join in if you would like your query, pitch, and first page critiqued.

Here is my revised query, in case anyone is interested. All comments are appreciated, and if you leave me a link to your query in the comments, I'll return the favor.

Query:

Seventeen-year-old Sophia de Paula sings like a rainforest bird, but her most marriageable quality is her Peetanguara decent. The so-called Easterner nobility wed red wives to recruit native laborers for the sugarcane fields, and Sophia’s fair, noble cousin needs her in order to claim the family barony. But she would rather drown like her brother than marry someone who keeps trying to take her by force.

When her native grandmother entreats her to awaken Ig, the Water Goddess, and save the native tribes from the conquering Easterners, Sophia leaps at the chance to flee her controlling Easterner relatives. No one has seen Ig for fifty years, since the fair invaders arrived from across the sea. But, disappointingly, the Goddess Sophia awakens turns out to be more interested in Easterner fashion than the devastation of the rainforest and the tribes.

Apart from bestowing water-controlling powers on Sophia, Ig’s advice is to seek another deity, a powerful Goddess no one knew existed, and ask her to bring peace to the land once and for all. Ig’s quest will send Sophia deep into the rainforest the Easterners keep burning, and if she doesn’t succeed, marriage to her cousin will be the least of her worries. If she fails, Sophia’s tribal relatives will perish at the hands of the conquerors who married into her family.

SHROUDED GODDESS is a 68,000 word YA fantasy set in a world that mirrors South America during the Portuguese colonization of the sixteenth century. With Avatar waterbending in the rainforest, this story will appeal to fans of Leigh Bardugo’s Grisha trilogy.