Title: SARA AND THE STEPPS
Category: MG
Genre: Contemporary Fantasy
Word Count: 45,000

Pitch:

A wise lizard named Randalf tempts 10-year-old Sara with the perfect escape from her seven new Stepp brothers. She can slip into any book in the Book House library – learning tips and tricks she can use against her brothers from classic stories she only thought she knew. But, when she accidentally falls into “Alex in Danderland”, she realizes she doesn’t know how to get back out – and the Queen of Farts has just named Sara “Odorous Enemy Number One”.

Question 1: In your MC’s voice, what costumed character do you relate most to and why?

I relate most to the Tardis, for sure. Like the Tardis, my magical books are bigger on the inside and full of awesome adventures!

Question 2: As an author, what makes your manuscript a tasty treat (aka unique/marketable)?

I know a lot of books parody/mirror other classic stories, but I’m hoping my approach turns the classics upside down and inside out.

First 250 words:

Sara Lew knew all about the creepy old house down the street.  It was the first thing any of their neighbors would talk about when she and her dad moved in to the neighborhood a few years ago.  She’d overheard the Bartlett’s from next door telling her dad about this kid who had been hired to mow the lawn at the Book House. Apparently, he’d had a violent allergic reaction to the grass, even though he wasn’t allergic to grass, and they said he’d almost died!  And then little Spike Herman who lived on the corner had told her that he’d tossed a Frisbee into the yard and that it just hung in the air for like an hour or something, spinning and spinning until it finally broke into tiny little pieces.  Sara had never seen any of these things, but her dad forbade her to go anywhere near the Book House all the same.

Still, Sara stared out her second-story window at the lizard-shaped weather vane that sat atop the highest peak on the Book House roof, watching it spin one way and then the other.  She’d avoided that house, just as her dad had asked, for years now. But at this moment, she wanted more than anything to slip through the black wrought-iron gate guarding the Book House and into the tall, scratchy grass beyond.

“Sara, honey?  Can you come downstairs, please?” she heard her dad call.

She bunched her black curls into a scrunchy and sighed.