I've put this one away for a while but I haven't yet given up on it. So I figure, since I've already self-edited it to death, it needs a beta reader since it's never really had one.
Here's my query that I was sending out to agents before I quit querying this project:
Clara Vargas Leighton is the adopted daughter of a colonel and his wife, a model mini-aristocrat during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But she suppresses violent flashbacks to the brutal kidnapping of her biological parents by the dictatorship’s secret police. Until now.
When her classmate Max inspires her with his scathing, mumbled commentary about the dictatorship in history class, Clara decides that there’s a grain of truth to these foggy memories of hers and begins to investigate them for herself. She is shaken to the core when she learns from Susana, her sympathetic, Pinochet-hating schoolteacher, the truth behind her flashbacks and about her parents. They didn’t die in a car accident, like she always thought. Instead Clara’s parents are among the more than one thousand people who ‘disappeared’ back in the 1970s. The phrase ‘to disappear’ carries many horrible connotations for people in Chile that point to torture and clandestine execution by the secret police. She sheds her patrician skin as she learns her adoptive parents were delightfully complicit in the state terror that gave them three-year-old Clara.
I could try my best to read and critique a project in return, but I'm in college right now and am already balancing my own writing with my schoolwork, so that might be a tad difficult.
Here's my query that I was sending out to agents before I quit querying this project:
Clara Vargas Leighton is the adopted daughter of a colonel and his wife, a model mini-aristocrat during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But she suppresses violent flashbacks to the brutal kidnapping of her biological parents by the dictatorship’s secret police. Until now.
When her classmate Max inspires her with his scathing, mumbled commentary about the dictatorship in history class, Clara decides that there’s a grain of truth to these foggy memories of hers and begins to investigate them for herself. She is shaken to the core when she learns from Susana, her sympathetic, Pinochet-hating schoolteacher, the truth behind her flashbacks and about her parents. They didn’t die in a car accident, like she always thought. Instead Clara’s parents are among the more than one thousand people who ‘disappeared’ back in the 1970s. The phrase ‘to disappear’ carries many horrible connotations for people in Chile that point to torture and clandestine execution by the secret police. She sheds her patrician skin as she learns her adoptive parents were delightfully complicit in the state terror that gave them three-year-old Clara.
I could try my best to read and critique a project in return, but I'm in college right now and am already balancing my own writing with my schoolwork, so that might be a tad difficult.