An Agent's Inbox #14

Dear Ms. Nelson,

A decade after September 11th killed her voice teacher and her opera career, a still-traumatized soprano returns to Mendocino, where her rekindled passion for music threatens her relationships with her husband and son.

MENDOCINO MUSIC, upmarket women’s fiction complete at 96,000 words, explores the sacrifices necessary when talent pulls in one direction and love in another. New Yorker Marina Bridgepoint and her teen-aged son Jimbo move to her childhood home when her husband’s job sends him to Hong Kong. The aging church choir director who first nurtured Marina’s talent pulls both Jimbo and Marina into the world of music, and Marina finally grapples with the trauma of 9/11. Marina’s prodigious talent tempts her back into the world of opera, though her son’s growing ambitions as a jazz trumpeter may be sacrificed to his mother’s dreams. Through it all, the stresses of long-distance marriage threaten her relationship with her husband. Though Christianity shapes several of the secondary characters, this is not a work of inspirational fiction. Like Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me and Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple, the novel examines the tensions which arise when a talented mother and her precocious and equally talented child pursue their competing interests. Mendocino Music does not have the absurdly comic tone of Semple’s novel, but shares its fascination with the deep bonds between mother and child.

I have published a 2,500-word story entitled “Knitting,” in the anthology, The Adventure of Creation and have written extensively for local charitable organizations. I am passionate about vocal music, though do not sing opera. This is my first novel. 

Thank you for your consideration. 

Sincerely,

D.Z.R.

MENDOCINO MUSIC

Walking away, walking towards. Maybe that was wrong. Marina was cowering away. The thought of actually desiring something enough to move towards it was so foreign now.

Behind her rose the steeple of the Mendocino Presbyterian Church, a white landmark on the windy, damp coast. Further back and across the highway stood the shabby little house she’d grown up in, her suitcases and her son Jimbo’s now adding to the clutter. Their brownstone in New York was a continent away, sublet to strangers. She walked away from it all, pulling her cashmere close. Even her sweater was out of place here in the land of fleece. Her sister Connie, walking with Jimbo just in front of her, looked completely at home. Connie had never left Mendocino, and still ran the hardware store the two sisters had inherited from their parents.

Mendocino wasn’t the sunny California New Yorkers imagined. Today, the fog hung low to the ground, flattening the light. Once it lifted, she and Jimbo and Connie would be able to see the Pacific, but now the grasses in the meadow across the street only hinted at the wilderness of cold salt water just beyond the town.

She and Jimbo were supposed to be on the other side of that ocean, living with James in Hong Kong while he opened a new office for his New York law firm. They’d told their friends they’d be leaving New York, and then Marina had failed in Hong Kong.