So, I decided to toss a brief Friday Feedback together because I'm suddenly really needing some feedback.

Frankie Sky is one of two YA manuscripts I've been working on during the past 18 months, and I've just started a big revision and am wondering about the opening hook. I've been spinning my wheels a bit on the very opening and would love your honest feedback.

Are you interested? Is there a hook? What do you like? What do you not like?

And, if you want to post an excerpt for the same feedback, please do!


Chapter One
The first time I see Frankie Schyler, he's diving into the Lawrenceville Country Club pool, which is only the first of many coincidences that will make me question everything I know about life, death, and the nature of our existence during the short eight weeks of summer.

It's not so much coincidence as stupidity that Frankie marches to the edge of the coping, arms raised above his mop of blond curls, and purposefully plunges himself headfirst into the water, but rather the coincidence is that I am here, too, staring at the very same water, wondering if I might walk over and slip myself in, then sink to the bottom and disappear.

Or, maybe that's not a coincidence either, since I've spent much of the past four years thinking about ways to disappear.

For example, there was the Year of Non-Breathing the year I turned twelve, which was one year after I let my brother Simon die. I'd read a story about a Buddhist monk who had meditated himself right into his own death. The article described how, knowing his body's physical demise was near, he sat by a tree and made his breath so slow and barely, until he simply ceased to exist. I wanted that, too. I wanted to cease to exist.

For months I practiced endlessly. Every day after school, I would sit in front of the beautiful, old oak tree in our backyard, close my eyes, and make my inhales and exhales slower and more shallow until I couldn't feel my chest move or the air go in or out. But when I'd finally open my eyes, I'd still be there alive, our house in front of me, everything intact, except Simon.


- gae