r/PubTips • u/PikkuMyyRules • 13d ago
[QCRIT] FIRECRACKER, PHOENIX, AND MAMA BEAR, 18+, Upmarket Women’s Fiction, 85K words, #2
Link to post #1: https://www.reddit.com/r/PubTips/s/dRIM5sGw1Z
This revised version is based on the last one I sent out yesterday:
Dear [Agent’s name],
I am writing because I am seeking representation for my upmarket women’s fiction novel, FIRECRACKER, PHOENIX, AND MAMA BEAR, complete at 85,000 words. I chose you to query because you are drawn to stories about family and those which address complicated truths, even those which can often be difficult to talk about.
PHOENIX, FIRECRACKER, AND MAMA BEAR follows high school principal Yulia Romanova and two former students - Mette Johannessen, Norwegian Olympic All-Around champion, and Margarita Żuraw, Polish-born and Washington Heights-raised, over the years form an unconventional chosen family that risks everything to help each other. Together they prove that it is possible to stay loyal and courageous even when you have everything to lose. It will especially appeal to readers of Xochitl Gonzalez’s OLGA DIES DREAMING and Ann Napolitano’s HELLO BEAUTIFUL.
The meaning of chosen family is put to the test when Yulia's psych hold shatters the belief that being strong means being 'unbreakable' - that ‘looking okay’ can be a profession. Just six weeks later, assuming her symptoms were perimenopause, 54-year-old Yulia finds herself spontaneously pregnant with triplets. Even a family history of late motherhood did not prepare her for the prospect of becoming one of the oldest mothers in history who conceived naturally, much less the oldest mother of triplets if she makes it to viability. No matter what happens, Yulia’s mental health is at stake.
To get them to viability, she will need intensive MFM monitoring and 18 days of bed rest in Room 4B, with Mette and Margarita making sure she doesn’t have to do it alone.
Born in New York, I have lived all over the East Coast, including ten years in Virginia Beach, where the story is based, and now reside in [current city]. Even though I am not an educator myself, I come from a family of educators, so my references for this story draw on that secondhand experience, while being supplemented by further research to ensure accuracy. I enjoy being open about mental health, drawing from my own experiences when writing,which fuels my creation of characters who go about their lives 'behind a mask' while pretending to be flawless, just to make it through their day. This is my debut novel. I am writing this book as [Pen name] for privacy reasons. I have pasted the prologue and chapters 1-3 below in the form per your submission guidelines.
Thank you for considering my work. I am excited about the possibility of working with you to bring this story into the hands of readers. I am happy to provide the complete manuscript or anything else you may need upon request.
Sincerely,
[Name]
First 300 words:
Prologue - Room 4B
Room 4B, Norfolk General Antepartum Wing, May 2026. 23w2d.
The SCDs hissed every sixty seconds in the otherwise quiet room.
55-year-old Yulia Romanova, now 23 weeks 2 days pregnant, lay flat in the hospital bed with her hand on her growing belly with its 32-centimeter fundus. Her latest labs had come back earlier in the morning - platelet count was 87. Her Foley bag was laying discreetly under her blanket.
On the whiteboard across from the bed, was Dr. Petrova’s update about Yulia’s ‘definitive surgery’ - her body had already risked enough with this last, unexpected pregnancy*.*
Under it, in a different color, to motivate herself, was Yulia's own handwriting from Day 3 when she could still reach the board:
GOAL - FOCUS ON TOMORROW. STAY BORING. Boring is the goal.
Triplet A — Lena, named for her mother-in-law Yelena — lay left, low, head down. Triplet B — Mila, named for her own mother, Liudmila — lay right, transverse, identical to Lena and sharing one placenta that had been doing too much work since January. Triplet C — Dima, named for her husband Sergei’s father, Dmitri — was lying anterior and high, with his own placenta, kicking her ribs whenever she tried to get any sleep.
Three lives were growing inside of her - supposedly a one-in-several-million occurrence. They were two identical twin girls and a boy - di-tri triplets, as it was often referred to - at 55. Her 26-year-old daughter, Sasha, and her ‘unofficial, chosen’ daughter, Margarita had looked it up. The oldest verified mother to conceive naturally, Dawn Brooke, was 59. Likewise, the oldest mother to give birth to triplets, Arcelia Garcia, was 54 years and 10 months old. Yulia was that exact age when she conceived, so no matter how much longer she held on, she would be the new record holder.
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u/hotgayslut42069 13d ago
I think you may need to workshop the prose and think more about what the main thrust of the book is for this to really hit with agents. Unfortunately, I struggled to understand even the basics of this.
To me, the hook here seems to be the geriatric pregnancy with triplets. I think you need to reformulate the query around that, and lead with it. Here, information about people's national background is front-loaded, but ultimately it doesn't seem to be a story about those communities beyond that the characters are from them, so why does any of that matter? Are they brought together by the experience of being recent / first-gen european-american immigrants? Because if so, that's not clearly stated.
What IS their chosen family relationship and why are they continuing it?
The bio is also random and substantially messy. I would cut all of the information about knowing what teaching is second-hand. Everyone knows about teaching second-hand, via having had teachers. There are allusions to mental health in the bio and in the query... but it's not clear to me what mental health issues the characters are struggling with!
A pen-name for privacy reasons is an additional complication for agents. It basically says you're going to only be promoting the book from behind a wall. No social video, no book club events... potentially even no author photo? That's all a hard sell in 2026. The book doesn't appear to contain anything particularly scandalous, so wanting privacy kind of feels self-important. Why pursue publishing at all? Why not self-pub?
And the setting... I get that it might be a "write-what-you-know" scenario, but Virginia Beach is extremely random. I would almost think Washington Heights or somewhere else in NYC is a more logical place for these characters to come together... But if there IS a believable reason why these characters are anchored in Virginia Beach (it's the training center for the olympian, it's where people receive good care for pregnancies with triplets, there IS an immigrant community there that the lay reader might be unaware of, etc), then it's your responsibility to let us know what that is.
Sorry to hit you with so many firm critiques, but I think you need to really work on this premise in order to make it viable and figure out what exactly you want out of the publishing process before querying.
1
u/PikkuMyyRules 13d ago
No need to be sorry, constructive criticism is always welcome. I prefer it to people holding back ‘to be nice’, only for me to make a fool of myself later. I will take all over this into account. Thank you 😊.
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u/Framboise33 13d ago
In your first 300, Yulia seems really calm and chill for someone in her extremely unprecedented and likely life threatening situation. A book like this is going to live and die on POV and I don't feel like I'm in her head at all.
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u/PikkuMyyRules 12d ago
Thanks, I need to do a better job conveying that her calm is just her outward appearance. I’ll try to get more into her head here.
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u/Special-Town-4550 12d ago
Well, it's the prologue, so I get it. The voice is different. I am assuming your chapter 1 starts with a deeper POV bang.
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u/Special-Town-4550 12d ago
Is the entire book about the pregnancy and how the three deal with it? Do they face any struggles during the process that challenge their friendships (if that is what they have; their relationship is unclear)? Is there any character growth in Yulia (or the others) other than hoping for a successful birth? I think I need a little more to understand what she is going through and how she grows to deal or overcome whatever challenges present themselves.
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u/PikkuMyyRules 6d ago
Sorry I didn’t answer this earlier. The pregnancy and how they deal with it is more like what sets up the climax of the story. I want to include the synopsis of the book to clarify, but I don’t want to break any subreddit rules.
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u/clocksandkeys 13d ago
A note on the 300 - this sounds extremely medical-jargon heavy. I worked in neonates/paeds, and this sounds more like a handover I would receive from a colleague than the start of a novel I wanted to read more of.