11/08/2012
Pat Esden (Shadowqueen on QT) has signed with agent Pooja Menon of Kimberley Cameron & Associates.
After querying MOONHILL for about two months, I had requested material out with eight agents. I expected a long wait, so I decided to enter some contests not only to approach new agents but also to keep my mind occupied.
Here’s the query which netted me requests from ten other agents:
Seventeen-year-old Anie Freemont never believed the stories her papa told about their ancestral home, Moonhill. Mystical rings which eat souls, genies in jars . . . she figured the frightening tales were simply another of her antique dealing Papa’s eccentricities. That is, until Papa’s diagnosed with dementia and she’s forced to take him back to Moonhill and the estranged family they’d fled when she was three-years-old.
All Anie wants is to help Papa get better, so they can leave as fast as possible. But from the moment they arrive, she’s isolated from him. She notices disturbing things too, including human-shaped shadows in Moonhill’s gallery and a witch’s pentagram under her bed. When Papa turns violent and she discovers he’s not seeing a doctor, Anie begins to suspect the root of his illness lies with the decade old mystery surrounding her mother’s death in Moonhill’s graveyard.
But to separate truth from tale, Anie will have to use every devious skill she learned while picking and selling antiques with Papa to outwit an evil that’s closer to her heart and more powerful than she imagines—and a family who prefer to keep her in the dark.
Complete at 70,000-words, MOONHILL is a YA gothic with an atmosphere reminiscent of classics by Phyllis Whitney, Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt, and will appeal to readers who enjoyed the con artist main character in Holly Black’s WHITE CAT.