However, internet searching and blind speculation was only ever going to reveal so much. And the more I thought about it, what better way is there to get to know a literary agency than by reading some of the books the place is responsible for?
I began making it a point to catch up on a number of those books. Obviously I was most curious about the ones my own agent, Carrie Howland, helped usher into the world. (I’m including her last name here in case someone running an internet search while researching agents finds this post in their results; maybe they’ll find some helpful information!) When you’re a writer and you’re querying agents, one of the most common bits of advice out there is to familiarize yourself with what agents have represented in the past so you can judge whether or not they’d be a good fit for your work. Since Carrie found me through a pitch contest, I had to go through something of a reverse approach to this, to see if I could piece together how I wound up on her list. I faithfully bought and read copies of the books by her other authors as they were released, which, as it turned out, wasn’t always super-encouraging: I was working on my own revisions as I read the other clients and would often think, “What? These people aren’t just writers, they’re ARTISTS, and I’m totally sitting here in flyover country at the little kid table and I am so woefully out of my league and HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?! Was she suffering from a crippling migraine or something like that on the day she agreed to take me on?” I looped back to that brand of insecurity more than once.
Of course I got over it, mostly by reminding myself that while it was obviously true I could never write the books those other people had written, they likely couldn’t have done what I was doing, either; different perspectives, and personal expressions, and individual voices, and a variety of life experiences and stories to tell, and all that. So, I just let my idealized image of these people traveling around on their book tours, and smiling at every person who showed up at their signings, and being effortlessly engaging during at readings or interviews or conferences sit there in my head while I worked onward.
Along the way, social networking let me get to know a lot of these other writers. Some were eagerly/patiently anticipating the upcoming releases of their books, and I vicariously latched onto them to closely follow their progress, hoping to pick up some sense of what it could be like if/when I found myself in a similar position someday (I know, I’m hedging here, but despite the unwavering confidence I have in Carrie, I refuse to jinx anything).
In the space of about three months this past winter, three of the books I’d been following were released almost one after the other, and of course I went and bought them all. As of this week I’ve finally finished reading all three, and now I’d like to tell you a little bit about each one and my experiences with them. Maybe you’ll recognize something here that sounds interesting to you, or possibly for someone else you know, and you’ll decide to pick any of them up for yourself. For the record, these would all be categorized as young adult, which, admittedly, is not a demographic I will ever be confused for. Teen angst? Love stories? Not usually the highways I travel. But these books, from Melissa, and Isabel, and Liza! The simple fact that Carrie had decided to represent them out of the so many other options she had was more than enough endorsement for me.
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| Whether or not I get strange looks when I take pictures of the books I'm buying totally depends on the cashier. |
Arrows, by Melissa Gorzelanczyk
To start, I’m proud to say I know Melissa well enough that I could list some of her favorite bands for you, and also I spelled her last name right on the first try without looking it up (not to mention I could pronounce it for you as well). Arrows was the first of the three I read. Melissa was one of the first of Carrie’s clients to congratulate me when I joined the agency, so she was one of my initial gateways into the writing world. She’d gotten her book deal just months earlier, so I’d been waiting for a good long time to get a look at her work.
Arrows is so much of a love story that the cover art is a heart-shaped balloon pierced by an arrow. It’s a teenage love story at its core, but also a combination of greek mythology and teen pregnancy, taking place inside the worlds of high school, competitive dance, and Mount Olympus. As I read my way into this story of a Cupid trying to repair a mistake made that changes the trajectory of a promising young dancer’s life, I’m thinking, “high school…check, love story…check, swooning…check, dance…check, mysterious new boy in town…check.…” and then out of nowhere BOOM, somehow I was halfway done without even realizing how much I’d read, and I was thinking, “Oh, come on!! I know, I get it, magical arrows and all, but how can Karma not see how wrong that complete chump of a boyfriend is for her?!” I got pulled into such a quick read that I finished it in two sittings, the second of which was an afternoon marathon that seeped so deeply into my subconscious I actually dreamt about the characters that night.
Bookishly Ever After, by Isabel Bandeira
After finishing Melissa’s book, I went into this one more open minded when it came to reading about teenage romance. Isabel was another writer who had things coming together with her book just as I arrived on the Donadio list, so I got to witness online moments like her trying to decide on author photos and promotional bookmarks, which, from my perspective, were checklist items almost too awesome to imagine.
Right away I saw this book would revolve around something I didn’t know anything about: Book Boyfriends. I didn’t know that was even a thing until a year or two ago, but the main character here was all about that because she was always reading, and was mentally bouncing between a guy at school she had a crush on, and the guy at school her best friend was steering her toward, and the romantic leads in the books she read. She had a fairly normal high school life even though she was constantly reading, and tended to see her world how her favorite book characters would, which sometimes got her into awkward moments but also bolstered her up to do things that may have been going against her more shy nature, particularly when the guys at school were involved. Isabel wrote parallel passages from the books her main character Phoebe was reading, to demonstrate how Phoebe would use ideas from her favorite books to guide some of her decisions; I asked Isabel once how thoroughly she had worked out the fictional books Phoebe was reading. She said she had fairly extensive outlines for each. Which I thought was awesome.
By the time I was maybe a hundred pages in, I was thinking, “These kids seem to have a decent and relatively comfortable high school existence going on. Not the worst life to have, I guess, but outside of this girl who reads a lot, I don’t have anyone to relate to. How do I connect to this?” And after awhile it came to me: I had no connection to it, not really. But that turned out to be my hook, to take this book as a window into a world that otherwise I wouldn’t have known anything about (and probably isn't so different from the world my nephews live in right now). From there the whole thing became something like permitted eavesdropping as I followed all of the things these kids did in their lives, and how they interacted with each other, and what was important to them. From that perspective it just got more and more fascinating to witness.
Hello?, by Liza Wiemer
This one tells the story of how the lives of a group of teenagers intersect due to a phone call that may not have been as random as it first seemed, and proved to be a catalyst for many things that followed. The hook here is how the narration is shared between five characters, with the same events unfolding and told through their varied perspectives. Beyond having each character narrate in a particular voice, two of them even go into different formats as one recounts the events as part of a screenplay she is writing, and another interprets them through poetry. Each character experiences some kind of change as secrets (some even kept from themselves) come to light as the invisible strings binding the five kids bring them closer together. It reminded me a lot of a book called Among Friends I'd been assigned to read in my MA program, in the way the characters traded off narration duties throughout the story. I had some long reads in this one as well, and, as I told Liza once on Twitter while I was reading, I discovered that Bob Mould’s music (his new album “Patch the Sky” in particular) served as a good soundtrack for the book. It’s tricky enough to write a story with one of the characters narrating in the first person, but to do that with five people at once, and to do it with five different voices so distinctly written that you never forget which character is telling the story? Not an easy feat to pull off, and she did it really well.
Now that I’ve finished the set, I almost feel like I just read one really long book instead of three moderately long ones. In the time it took to finish my YA trifecta, another of Carrie’s clients had a release date show up, which now means Kaitlyn Greenidge’s now-acclaimed bit of literary fiction “We Love You, Charlie Freeman” will soon be added to my summer reading queue. I’ve got some other books to get to before that, but now that I’m done with Arrows, Bookishly Ever After, and Hello? I feel I have an even better idea about what draws Carrie to a project than I did before. First off, I think it’s fair to say her interests are pretty diverse. For this I’m eternally thankful, since the two manuscripts she and I are working with are about as different as two middle grade stories could be, and she still really likes them both. Additionally, I’d say what pulls her in about the books she wants to represent is ultimately the writing. Every one of the books she’s sold that I’ve read, of course including these most recent three, have been the kind that can occasionally pull you out of the story because you just have to take a moment and appreciate how skillfully the writing was crafted.
For my part, it’s humbling to think I was even considered to be included on a list with any of these writers. As solitary of an endeavor as writing can frequently be, these books stand as testimony to how I find myself in some extremely good company. If anything, knowing what the other writers at Donadio & Olson, and especially the ones on Team Howland, are capable of producing only pushes me to try even harder.
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