QK Round 3: Book Boys Gone Wild vs Nowhere Land

Title: Paper Seeds
Entry Nickname: Book Boys Gone Wild!
Word Count: 109K
Genre: YA Contemporary Fantasy

Query: 

When seventeen-year-old Harlow Jackson gets dumped at her grandma Minny's wake, she's devastated, pissed as hell, and without an escort for the debutante season starting the very next day. But then Harlow finds something Minny left her: paper seeds. Minny always told her that if you place a magical paper seed in a book, and plant it in the ground, you can grow anything you desire from its pages.

In a fit of desperation, revenge, and, okay fine, a little too much funeral punch, Harlow grows teenage versions of Mr. Knightley, Sherlock Holmes, Dorian Gray, and Dracula to be her and her friends' debutante escorts. Because everyone knows there's only one thing better than a handsome, well-groomed, drawling Southern beau... an English gentleman. Harlow is tired of feeling second rate in her small Southern town, and vows to use the boys to beat her ex, and the mean-girl debutantes, at their own game. Frankly, she'd love to burn their perfect curls off their pretty little heads, but that would just be gravy. Instead, she'll settle for winning the debutante crown and the accompanying cash scholarship prize, which she badly needs.

Harlow passes the boys off as four rather eccentric foreign exchange students, and everything goes according to plan until the book-boys discover their own origins and run amok. At the same time, the town witch, Madame LeRoux, comes after Harlow for the paper seeds, claiming that planting them will have dark consequences for Harlow and the people she loves. Harlow must uncover the origin and twisted history of the paper seeds to discover a way to undo what she's grown. But as generations of town secrets and lies begin to unravel, Harlow discovers it was her beloved grandmother Minny who may have been hiding the biggest, ugliest secret of them all.

First 250:

If I hadn’t been standing in the middle of my grandmother Minny's wake, I would have whacked that boy in the man parts so hard, people would be looking at pictures of his children in years to come and say—see the funny ear that kid has? Harlow Jackson did that.

But Jonathan took my hand and squeezed it, like he was bestowing some sort of warm comfort on me. He wore the gray shirt I'd saved up a week's wages for, the one that was the exact color of his eyes.

Now, I wanted to rip it off him.

And not in a good way.

I took a deep breath and tried to be civil. “Your parents will get used to the idea of us. I have a way of winning people over, you know.” I smiled my most becoming smile and flashed my dimple. Jonathan loved my dimple. Everyone loved my dimple.

He closed his eyes. “It’s not that, Harlow.”

“Then what is it?” I said, too loud.

Madison Pace cocked her ear in our direction as she scooped bean dip onto her plate at the food table. Nosey was not an adjective in this town, it was a given.

I tugged Jonathan’s hand, and he followed me out onto the front porch. The sky was gray, just waiting to burst open, the air heavy and thick. October in Georgia was not a cool, crisp autumn. It’s more like standing over a pot of boiling pasta. Or maybe more like being the pasta.

Versus

Title:  FOLLOW THE SUN
Entry Title:  Nowhere Land
Word Count:  75K
Genre: Historical YA (#ownvoices)

Query:

In 1969, Rett syndrome is unheard of. But come hell or high water, Jackie is determined to discover the reason why her four-year-old sister, Evie, suddenly lost the ability to speak and control her hands.  Her parents find it easiest to accept their small town doctor’s generic diagnosis that Evie was born with physical and mental impairments. Jackie doesn’t buy it. Evie wasn’t born that way; she regressed just before turning two.  So, Jackie spends months secretly mailing letters to various doctors around the country. She’s convinced that if she can find one expert with a possible explanation for Evie’s symptoms, it will force her parents down a path toward determining the cause.

That’s a lot to handle for a seventeen-year-old, though, and no amount of getting drunk with her flower child friends, flirting with a guy who’s caught her eye, or bickering with her June Cleaver-ish mother keeps Evie’s condition from constantly gnawing away at the back of Jackie’s mind. When she finally hears of a doctor in Austria who might have an answer to the riddle that is Evie, Jackie’s world begins to brighten.  But, Evie’s disability becomes too much of a hassle for her self-absorbed mother and father, and they make plans to institutionalize her in another state.

Devastated by the idea of separation from Evie, Jackie makes a rash decision:  she’ll take off on a planned trip with her friends to the Woodstock music festival, and she’ll never come back. If Evie won’t be in Everton anymore, Jackie doesn’t want to be either. But she can’t shake the feeling that the best place for Evie is with her family.  As Woodstock ends, Jackie must decide to either find a new life elsewhere or return home to reveal the information she discovered to her parents and convince them that Evie is capable of more than they believe.  If only they’ll listen.
 
First 250: 

Woodstock Music & Art Fair, August 1969
Day One – Late Afternoon

I inhale the scents of lost inhibitions disguised as weed and booze. They’re so thick it’s as if I can reach out and touch them; literally get a contact high. It’s a pretty killer scene, and after hours of waiting, the music’s finally starting. For most, time has no place here. You simply exist. You are here. It is today. The time is now. And it’s all good. But my mind flickers like the flashes of a camera between photos of the before and the after. The past and the present.

Between Evie and this field full of strangers.

The odors surrounding me vanish, replaced by the memory of more comforting aromas: cookies and apple juice. I smile, in spite of myself. But those thoughts angle my mind toward others that curdle my stomach, like Evie at the supper table with my parents, her hands tying themselves in knots. I’m not in my seat next to her, and she doesn’t understand why. The image of her face in my head pushes each beat of my heart one notch higher on the threshold of pain in my chest. As if some great chasm has cracked along my sternum, leaking a burning fire through the rest of my body.

I ache to see her, but I can’t go back home. Not after what I found out. Not after what I learned.

I swear I’ll never go back to Everton.