Nothing from Nothing

YA Contemporary, 62K, seeking representation

“They told me I was everything: ‘tis a lie.”

Sixteen-year-old heiress Riley Lear has lived a life of privilege in her small Midwestern town of Avon, thanks to the international success of her father’s business, Lear Pharmaceutical. When Riley is run off the road one night, she sets off on a journey to figure out if the person who murdered her mother 12 years earlier is coming for her. Since her dementia-addled father can’t help, she enlists the help of her best friend, Jack, and the new girl, Juliet, to find her mother's killer and unravel the lies she’s been fed her whole life.

The last thing Riley sees before she loses consciousness is a ghostly white face staring at her from above. The experience shakes free objects, clues, and deeply buried memories of her past, and Riley realizes her time for learning about her mother’s life and murder is slipping away with her father’s lucidity. She turns to the other adults in her life for help—her mom’s best friend, Katherine, and her father’s assistant, Anton—but she suspects that they aren’t exactly who they appear to be.

Complete at 62,000 words, Nothing from Nothing is a young adult contemporary novel very loosely based on Shakespeare’s King Lear (What can I say? Once an English teacher, always a Shakespeare lover). It will appeal to fans of Winter White (Annie Cardi), Beth Is Dead (Katie Bernet), and Into the Woods (Sondheim/Lapine).

After two decades of writing and editing for other people, I decided to start writing a story only I could tell. It was the story I needed in high school; the story that would have made me feel better about the way I walked through the world at 16.