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I am a part of the writing community on Twitter, and one of your followers. I feel compelled to query you, partially because I love your work on __, but mostly because I know you are a reader who appreciates YA adventures. I hope you will connect to my project: a finished, YA Adventure titled, “By Brain and Bone”, complete at 100,000 words. Unfortunately your word count is going to trip you up right out of the gate. YA is extremely crowded right now and a debut at 100k is going to be hard to sell. Don't cripple yourself with a bloated word count when the odds are already stacked against you.
In the over-technologized, sensor-saturated, near-future world of this story, genders have become extremely polarized. Especially in education. Why? I feel like in order to sell this world we need to know how this is a possibility, and that it's believable. Only females attend brick-and-mortar schools, while boys have been systematically withdrawn, isolated online, taught by screen. Again, why? Why are the girls allowed socialability and boys aren't? Sixteen-year-old Ewan is the exception. Because of his enormous ability to memorize nearly everything, Ewan is allowed to attend a brick-and-mortar high school alongside females. It isn’t a privilege. To Ewan, each day feels like a struggle to survive. Again, why? Why would his ability to memorize things make it reasonable to send him to a brick and mortar school instead?
Something else is also happening to boys. Ewan gradually discovers that the minds of young men are systematically being altered. A hurricane forces Ewan to live with his mysterious, estranged grandmother, a high-powered director of a large corporation that trains young men to be drone pilots. Ewan quickly finds out that she’s part of an overarching plan to permanently reconfigure the memory function in the brains of boys. A plan called: ReCognition.Again, why? What's the motivation for that?
What does Ewan do with this crucial information? Will he be able to intervene and halt the execution of this plan? More importantly, can he save himself from the villains who surveil his every move? “By Brain and Bone,” is Ewan’s coming-of-age adventure amid an oppressive technological world.
You defnitely don't want to end with leading questions. We know that there will be the question of - what does he do? I mean, that's a plot, right? I think what you need to get into this query is the larger questions. What we have here is a typical dystopian - a loner pushing back against the all powerful. What we need to know is that this world is believable, and what motivations are. Right now, I'm just getting very basic structure and genre out of this. I don't understand the world - how it got that way, why it's that way, and what the motivations of the uber-powerful are - and I don't know anything about Ewan other than that he's a boy with a good memory. Who is he? Strong? Kind? Bashful? Flirty? Altruistic? Emotionally unavailable? I have no idea who he is. Get human elements into this to make it stand out as a concept.