11/15/2017
Jennifer S Brown (jbrown68 on QT) has signed with agent Laney Becker of Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agents.
My query represents the novel that didn’t sell to publishers, but since it landed me my amazing agent, I’m happy to share:
For movie script supervisor Lisa Friedman, continuity and flow are the fundamental laws of life. In her movies, lipstick stains don’t disappear and reappear on coffee cups. Windows that have been shattered can’t later show up intact. Making sure A leads to B is the job hyper-organized Lisa was born to do—which makes the sixteen days that are missing from her own life all the more agonizing.
Sixteen days. What could have happened in sixteen days to make her birth parents decide to give her up? A search answers little: All she discovers is that both her parents were killed in a car crash years ago.
Lisa tries not to obsess, throwing herself into her work, traveling to locations around the world. Her boyfriend, a blockbuster movie director, is pressuring her to take their eight-year on-again off-again relationship to the next level, but how can she have a family of her own when she doesn’t know why her original family rejected her? She knows her adopted family—her real family—back home in Miami loves her and wants her, but Lisa can’t rid herself of that longing to know what happened in those first sixteen days. She finds herself visiting the grave of her birth parents every year around the anniversary of their death.
Until one visit changes everything. One visit where she meets a man—an Orthodox Jewish man—who demands to know why she is visiting his parents' grave. Lisa follows him into his small Orthodox Jewish community where the rules she’s lived by no longer apply: Her dresses are too short, her behavior immodest, her eating habits unkosher. Lisa must learn to adapt to age-old traditions as she gets to know a grandfather who is eager for the granddaughter he lost and a hostile older brother who wishes Lisa had never existed. Lisa will do whatever it takes as she begins to piece together who her parents were and what, exactly, happened in those sixteen days.
[My bio]
Attached, as a Word doc, is the first chapter of Continuity. I would be delighted to send you the completed manuscript (which is 84,000 words). Thank you for considering my novel.