Okay, so I'm working on getting a query for my first novel up and ready to be sent out, but I'm finding the genre to be a real stumbling block. I've been working under the assumption that my novel would be considered 'magical realism' for a while now, but when I posted my query in Share Your Work, a lot of people seemed hesitant to agree with me. Because my current query isn't necessarily flawless and people seem to be making certain assumptions about the story based off the query that aren't necessarily true (which is a whole different issue for me to work out), I thought I'd post a separate thread for a different set of eyes to give me some feedback.
My story is a YA romance which starts out with a main character with depression who's experiencing romantic feelings for her best friend. A large part of the story early on is her getting past her lack of confidence to ask said best friend out. Once they finally establish a relationship (about halfway into the book), our main character gets into a car accident and goes to the afterlife, where she finds out that our main goal in life as humans is to find our other half (basically our soul mate). She then works to be reunited with her love interest as soon as possible (resulting in her actually being brought back to life).
The reason that I lean more toward magical realism is that the vast majority of the story takes place in the "real world," and the afterlife doesn't even show up until about halfway through the story. I tried to make it so that the entire story reads as though it could plausibly happen, despite the fact that relatively unbelievable concepts like being brought back to life are present. However, a lot of people reading my query think I should advertise the story as straight-up "fantasy." I don't know what to do. I don't want to call something magical realism if it doesn't actually fall into that classification, because then I'll look stupid, but wouldn't an agent being presented with a fantasy novel be turned off when nothing remotely fantasy-esque happens in the sample chapters? Is there some other classification I can use?
My story is a YA romance which starts out with a main character with depression who's experiencing romantic feelings for her best friend. A large part of the story early on is her getting past her lack of confidence to ask said best friend out. Once they finally establish a relationship (about halfway into the book), our main character gets into a car accident and goes to the afterlife, where she finds out that our main goal in life as humans is to find our other half (basically our soul mate). She then works to be reunited with her love interest as soon as possible (resulting in her actually being brought back to life).
The reason that I lean more toward magical realism is that the vast majority of the story takes place in the "real world," and the afterlife doesn't even show up until about halfway through the story. I tried to make it so that the entire story reads as though it could plausibly happen, despite the fact that relatively unbelievable concepts like being brought back to life are present. However, a lot of people reading my query think I should advertise the story as straight-up "fantasy." I don't know what to do. I don't want to call something magical realism if it doesn't actually fall into that classification, because then I'll look stupid, but wouldn't an agent being presented with a fantasy novel be turned off when nothing remotely fantasy-esque happens in the sample chapters? Is there some other classification I can use?
