Potential Book - Manuscript Query Letter

*Special BOOK query!* This is a quarry letter I received while working for a literary agent (books, not films). Essentially, this makes no sense at all. One would think that if you were trying to get an agent to represent your book, that you might first make sure your quarry letter was written in passable English. This isn't. Also - this woman has other works published; what?! I've never been more blown away in my life.(posted by Dylan)

Dear Ms. Liss,

I've just completed a novel entitled The Fleets of Seldom and am now seeking representation. Here's a synopsis:

The Fleets of Seldom is a modern domestic drama soaked in classical, mythical blood. The novel is a non-linear narrative of 9 chapter; each chapter focuses on a specific character and is of that character's viewpoint. The Fleets live in the fictional desert town of Seldom, Arizona (a town surrounded with shifting sands and underneath those sands are skeletons, weapons, cockpits, rudders, fish hooks, dice, a tuba, anything). Olivia Fleet, the center of this family, the hub of it: after her husband's death 15 summers previous, she made decisions that seemed smart at the time, but which now have potent consequences, mostly impacting her two children, Caitlin and Caleb. Caitlin: a relentlessly sweet and sane girl, but inside her is a cauldron and it is now tipping. Caleb: a boy caught with Hustler and Aeschylus. After their father's death and their mother's deliberate walling in of pain and grief, these siblings become too close and their closeness is damaging and in this story comes to its ultimatum (and after their night of awful paradise, Caitlin despairs, but Caleb is liberated - though they were lead to believe the opposite would happen). Here too: Jamie Smithy, a clean cut and proper seeming guy who collides with the adult Caitlin and becomes tangled in the Fleet family (and tangled into Caleb's fury and envy; Caleb attacks Jamie the night before the wedding, but oddly, Jamie welcomes this beating - there is a cracked heard under his mild surface). Here too: David Gambrel, a pianist who has lost his wow and who has almost lost his hands (teaching at a school in Kandahar when a suicide truck bomb blows it apart, blows apart the piano he's sitting at); he comes home to Seldom (his mother is suffering from dementia) and there is the Olivia of his memory (and how his memory of her lifts her and it is to David that she releases her grief at last; "Mourn now," says David).

Scenes in one character's chapter are echoed and overlap in another character's chapter (dialogue often used as a cue; for example, the day of the husband/father's death is seen through Olivia's eyes and child Caitlin's eyes and then merely as what was told to Caleb when he became old enough to understand). Stitched through with blood imagery (split lip, cut skin, a body broken on seashore rocks), The Fleets of Seldom is about borders crossed or borders avoided and what results from these choices.

My fiction has been published in current or recent issues of Pebble Lake Review, Salt Hill, The First Line, The Bullfight Review, Harpur Palate, jerseyworks.com, whimperbang.com, diceybrown.com. One of my stories has been recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. I'm a graduate of The College of Santa Fe, NM, but have since lived in my native Arizona.