I guess, I'm just wondering if you keep thinking 'Oh, I should add this in to the query letter" then maybe you're rushing to submit and need to spend more time on the query. Reading through Query Letter Hell may help you decide that.
What I'm reading from you is a lot of conflicting information. And I can only think that you're trying to hard to make the story sound marketable. (And, yes. That is the point of a query letter.) But you can't pitch your novel as something it's not just to make an agent read the sample pages because then they will be disappointed ("This isn't what the query indicated.") But my advice about the sample pages still stands. If you think the voice in those chapters is offputting, then change the book. Do not try and send in something more palatable as a sample, because if they do request more, you'll still be dealing with "But the opening is angsty teen whatever." (And quite likely "You can't follow submission guidelines.")
Just my thoughts. YMMV.
(Also, another comparable to a novel with a young adult character that isn't sold as YA is Ellen Foster.)
Thanks...yes...my book is closer to the voice of Secret Life of Bees in tone but Ellen Foster is definitely of the same genre without question and it's not marketed as a YA novel...I'm not misrepresenting anything in my queries...I'd been only querying the YA agents because I was told that the novel was YA simply because I have a 15 year old protagonist...I was told this at the WD conference...based on no other criteria though I pointed out the novels the book is similar to are not marketed as YA.
It has been surreal.
I've stopped submitting it to YA specific agents or with the words "YA" even in the subject line hoping someone out there will check it out seeing it as anything but YA, calling it anything they wish, as I had posted on here originally saying I had this dilemma and nobody could 'vocalize' what genre my book is and now I'm back to this again. It's completely absurd to remove the "offputting voice" of my protagonist at the beginning of the book as it's truthful to the trauma she's been through and would destroy the integrity of the story which I won't do just because half the YA agents I sent it to can't sell a book with a character's voice like this as NO YA book is published with a character's voice like this....because the book is NOT YA.
I looked at the Query Hell area and my issue needing the synopsis "fixed" or changing the opening of my book, ergo, is not addressing the problem.
If anything I've been adding specifics so no one's time is wasted while sending to these YA agents...my concern, from what these agents say, is it's possible the industry has created this category and is now locked into it, and I'd think if this is the case for sure Ellen Foster, written in 1987, would today be called YA in 2012 and would never have been published because it "doesn't fit into what they want now in YA".
For sure if this is the case, my novel will never find a home...I'm just hoping there has to be someone out there, besides Oprah, who is an advocate for these issues and these characters and these kinds of books.
As only 2 weeks have gone by since I started submitting, truth to tell I've yet to hear back from agents I've submitted to since I dropped calling it "YA" in the introduction to my queries....for now I'm calling it a coming of age fiction" which I've also read is the "kiss of death" in a query but I have no choice as this is what it is, and hope for the time being that suffices to not "misrepresent" the book.
Thank you for your suggestions they have been helpful.