Pitch Madnes B-1: YA: NOTHING BUT SKY

Genre: YA Historical

Word Count: 68,000

Pitch:

After WWI, wing walker Grace breaks boundaries as the only female on her barnstorming team. When a stunt goes wrong, she must choose between a future in the sky and her love on the ground.

Excerpt:

Coins plinked one after the other into a worn fedora passing through the growing crowd. The masses lining the old farm road paid to see a show, and if that meant watching me fall to my death, so much the better.

Children sat atop their father’s shoulders, the late afternoon sun melting the creamy treats in their hands. Red-cheeked women adjusted their hats, and fanned themselves wildly, praying for any kind of breeze. For most people the chaos would be a distraction, but the crowd, and their lively shouts, only spurred me on.

Nathan and I snuck through the masses. Our roadster sat only twenty feet away.

“You ready, Grace?”

Stepping over weeds and discarded handbills touting, “The greatest flying circus west of the Mississippi,” I winked and nodded in the direction of the car. “Race you.”

Leather goggles bounced around my neck as I ran. I pulled them over my eyes, securing the back against my dark knot of hair. Without a roof, the wind would tangle it in seconds.

Whispers in the crowd murmured the same thing: I was insane.

They were wrong.

I simply refused to be like other girls who mindlessly milled around downtown Lincoln. Half of them without jobs or goals for the future. President Coolidge promised change, but Nebraska was still the same since he took office. There was proof of it everywhere. Along the streets, grief covered the scarred faces of young men who lost limbs and friends in the Great War. 

Mr. Boddy is found in the Lounge stretched out on the couch, his throat cut and a handkerchief made out of Egyptian cotton embroidered with the letter “P” lays on the floor beside him.