Query Help YA Contemporary

[Sydney]

Hi! Any thoughts and feedback are welcome! This is just the blurb part.

Seventeen-year-old Ivy Stone made a mistake. She let people in, and her subsequent reaction when things went too far jeopardized the future of her father’s civil engineering firm— the same firm he expects her to eventually take over. When he sends her to live a state over and attend a new school for her senior year, she decides that she has always been better at moving through life as a loner and reassuming that identity will help her meet her father’s expectations. As suffocating as the pressure is, she’s convinced she can grit her teeth and endure even though her passions don’t align with his.

Ivy, instead, has always been fascinated by video games: researching them, playing them, and, more recently, programming them. So, when the opportunity for her to develop a game alongside her new classmates arises, she struggles to resist. As she navigates her strange new school, a boy with a smile too pretty for his own good, and a band of geeks that never fail to surprise her, her past threatens to catch up to her and disrupt the delicate balance she’s been trying to restore. Ivy can’t shake the weight of her past, but she has to decide how deeply she’ll allow it to affect her future.

[Nicole-Mary]

I really like it!

I would like to know a little more about Ivy's reaction, or what exactly you mean by jeopardizing her father's firm (but that could be my curiosity). I do think that telling us what Ivy did could show the reader more about the stakes or the kind of things that Ivy will resort to when she gets hurt.

I think the wording of the third sentence could do with changing a little because I think it's a bit too wordy, but it's a minor thing.
"When he sends ger to...attend a new school for her senior year, she realises that she's better at moving through life as a loner, and reassumes that identity to meet her father's expectations."

I think the start of the second paragraph would do with saying a little about what the father passions are. I know it's stated before, but at the start, I was a little bit confused.

I hope this is useful! :)

[J.R.]

This is a pretty good blurb. But I think you can make it better and stronger. ​I tried a rewrite for you with comments on where I think you can make the blurb stronger.

Seventeen-year-old Ivy Stone has always been a loner. But when she decides to make a change and let people into her life, she ends up overreacting and jeopardizing everything. [I want more detail here. Not a lot, but I would make this sentence more specific to your story. I am also assuming this is your inciting incident?]

Exiled by her father to a neighboring state and forced to adapt to a new school for her senior year, Ivy resumes her identity as a loner, finding her only solace is video games—researching them, playing them, and programming them. When one of her new classmates offers her the opportunity to develop a game, despite her instincts, Ivy can’t say no. As she works on the game and navigates her new school with the help of a boy with a smile too pretty for his own good and a band of geeks that never fails to surprise her, Ivy finds herself establishing a new life.

But the past won’t leave Ivy alone. And if she can’t find a way to cope with her past, she may also lose her future.

[Do you see how weak and sort of nebulous this sounds? Try to make this more concrete — future is a nebulous concept. Will she lose her new friends? Her future at her dad’s firm, if she even cares about that? The new video game they are working on won’t see the light of day? All of these things? Try to make your stakes more concrete — it’ll also help you decide what aspects of the story you want to emphasize in your blurb.]

Good luck!