Traitor
BY amanda mcrina Farrar, Straus and Giroux2020Query Letter
Lwów, Poland, July 1944. Seventeen-year-old Tolya Korolenko, a half-Polish, half-Ukrainian Red Army conscript and the son of a kulak farmer murdered by the Soviets, knows the principle of collective guilt: family members of traitors to the Motherland are punished along with the traitors themselves.
So when he shoots his political officer not-quite-by-accident and is sentenced to death by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, he knows he won’t be the only one to pay.
Rescued by a squad of Ukrainian-nationalist partisans, Tolya has every reason to believe his girlfriend, fellow soldier Nataliya Koval, is dead at the hands of the NKVD. Concealing his Polish heritage, he agrees to help the partisans assassinate the NKVD’s regional commander. But when somebody in the squad betrays the plan to the NKVD, all evidence points to Tolya as the traitor—especially when it turns out that the determined young NKVD agent close on their trail is none other than Nataliya.
TRAITOR (72,000 words) is YA historical fiction dealing with Polish-Ukrainian tensions during WWII. Following two connected timelines—one in 1944, one in 1941—TRAITOR is told in two alternating POVs. It should appeal to readers of Gwen C. Katz’s AMONG THE RED STARS and Ruta Sepetys’s SALT TO THE SEA.
About
Age Range
Young Adult
Genre
Historical Fiction
Word Count
72,000
Book Link
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374313524/traitor
Agent
Jennie Kendrick
Query Stats
Number of Queries Sent
67
Number of Full Requests Received
8
Number of Offers of Representation
1
Number of Months Spent Querying This Novel
3 months
Years Spent Writing Before Getting an Offer
6
Number of Manuscripts Queried Before This One
2
Publication Status of The Book Queried
Published (Big 5)
Years Spent Writing Before This Book was Published
8