Streamwriting

The Voice of Angels is a creepy novel with a very strong premise and a great grasp of the paranormal. I work in children’s and young adult publishing, and paranormal stories are selling quite solidly now. You’ve hit on a great area of the market, and that’s as important as great writing — you’ve tapped into a market with a huge growth potential and a built-in audience hungry for unique and original tales.

There are a lot of things that are working quite well here. The premise and plot are engaging. The idea that a young teen can see when people are going to die, but can’t quite explain it to anyone in her life for fear of being marked as a freak, is very compelling. You’ve also made a good start in making Lizzie sympathetic and believable, though I think that she could be a much stronger character, as I’ll discuss below. Her schoolmates are appropriately harsh for their age and situation, and I found myself cringing at the terrible comments that Bee made, especially with the knowledge that she and Lizzie used to be friends.

I also enjoyed watching a relationship develop between Ariadne and Lizzie. From reading just the sections that you’ve uploaded, I am intrigued by how the two might continue to get along and curious as to what secrets Lizzie will uncover as she explores her grandmother’s world. I was also quite impressed by your handling of Joopy. I felt as tense as Lizzie did when she refused to let go of her dog when forced off to school. It was painful to read – which means it was very well written.

There’s one principle reason why this isn’t suitable for HarperCollins at this time – the lack of a really strong central character. Yes, Lizzie’s story is compelling, but I was never truly compelled by Lizzie herself. I’m not sure I know much about Lizzie’s personality at this point, and that indicates to me that she needs to be a much stronger force in her own story. While I was very keen on finding out what would happen to her, and was gripped by the events in her life, Lizzie herself never quite stood out.

What’s more, I had a hard time distancing myself from the book’s authorial narrative voice. It’s fairly intrusive as it pops into the manuscript to tell me, the reader, how Lizzie is feeling or what Lizzie is thinking. I feel like the telling of the story could be much more organic: I would rather be able to see how Lizzie feels (through her actions and her dialogue), than be told by your narrative.

All things considered, this is a promising start. But I would encourage you to revise the manuscript with the aim of making Lizzie herself a really central force in the story, and making sure that the reader truly understands what she’s thinking and how she is feeling without having to tell us directly. As readers, we should be swept along by her story and her actions should mostly be able to speak for themselves.