The Option To Be by Meghan K. Strapec
I’m not writing this of my own free will. You’re probably wondering how someone could be forced to write something like this. I was wondering that myself, and I made it pretty clear that I thought it was a fantastically stupid idea, but that only got me in more trouble. If you get yourself into enough trouble, they can force you to do almost anything to get out of it, assuming you want to. And I do. I didn’t really mean to get into it in the first place, but that’s just how my life works.
When you grow up in middle-of-nowhere Ohio, anything outside your God-forsaken, piece-of-crap town sounds exciting, especially when that thing is leaving for college two years early. But when you come from a backwards place with a mother who forgets you exist and a father you’re not willing to mention in polite company (or any company), it’s hard to start fresh. You’ll try pretty hard, but sanity hasn’t come easy since Noah left. And after the eighty-seventh person calls you crazy, you might just be driven to get yourself into some trouble with the dean that leaves the entire university talking, whether or not they’ve got the facts right.
THE OPTION TO BE is a YA epistolary novel about becoming who you are instead of what has happened to you and offers comedy, empathy, and hope to the awkward outcast in all of us.
The Book Doctors:
We like the voice in this pitch very much. We really get a sense of what it will feel like to read the book. We also love the first sentence of this pitch. But we think the opening paragraph meanders a little bit after that. We’re not that interested in you speculating about what we’re wondering about. We want more facts about the situation. We are also very confused as to what’s the plot of your book. Part of the problem is that you use the second person. This makes it difficult to see what the action is that moves the story forward. What does this person do so that everyone calls him crazy? You tell me in the last sentence that there is comedy in your book, but I don’t see anything really funny in the pitch. I also see no comparable titles here, and I think this would serve you very well.