My comments and minor changes (
Monique.Golay@gmail.com):
Synopsis/Plot
The Panic of Closing Doors—Synopsis
One drowsy Sunday, a young man arrives at a house in Brighton and turns the lives of the Brock family upside down. The young man is Jonah, seeking his never-known father, Robert Brock: a middle-class and middle-aged husband and step-father, reconciled (so he thinks) to the ache of having no children of his own. Robert is both elated and bewildered to discover he has a twenty-one year old son, but Jonah is both a difficult and spiky character. He leaves as abruptly as he arrived, whose parting stirs up some un-named perils with his mother, Caroline, back in France.
These perils start with Robert compelled to seek out his son. The search takes him to Boston, Massachusetts, where he finds Jonah living in squalor with the mother of his unborn child. The more Robert sees of this awkward, spiteful and viciously humorous boy, the less comfortable he feels. The reunion ends with Robert losing his temper and striking Jonah [
Here you could wield in a plot where Jonah becomes very rich and disinherits his father for having hitting him, perhaps in a sequel]. On top of this, Robert’s absence is causing tension at home and at work.
Citing concern for his mother, Jonah abandons his pregnant partner and manipulates Robert into gifting him a plane ticket to Paris. Robert insists on joining Jonah and they spar the entire journey. On arrival, it appears that Caroline has disappeared from the family home. Jonah fears she may be a suicide risk. As they search for the missing Caroline, Robert is increasingly disturbed by Jonah’s behaviour—he’s a different person every day—and finds himself drawn into his son’s sinister world
[sinister money world?]. Meanwhile, Robert’s wife, Patty, travels to Paris to bring her husband home. Robert’s extended absences cost him his job.
The search for Caroline ends when Roberts realises that everything Jonah has told him is a lie. Caroline is healthy and happy, and Jonah has used Robert to further his own sordid aims. Robert learns of Jonah’s troubled path to manhood: a life punctuated with similar flights of obsessive, destructive fantasy.
Caroline coaxes Jonah back to Normandy while Robert and Patty return to England, wondering if they’ll see Jonah again. Robert doesn’t have to wait long because Jonah has a new vision: his mother and father reunited; the three of them living together in familial harmony. There is no place in Jonah’s plan for Patty and her daughter.
Jonah secretly travels to England where he stalks the Brock family, disrupting their lives and conducting an anonymous hate campaign against Patty. He tries to force Robert and Caroline back together and befriends Robert’s step-daughter, manipulating her to his own ends. For respite, Robert takes his family to Boston to visit Jonah’s ex-girlfriend and the new baby. Jonah follows and forces a physical confrontation before disappearing again.
The Brocks return to England, where Jonah launches a last, desperate attempt to fashion the family he craves. In the final confrontation, Jonah tries to prove an affair between Robert and Caroline. When that fails, Jonah tells Patty how he plans to destroy her daughter. Driven to a moment of temporary insanity, Patty wounds Jonah with a kitchen knife.
We leave the Brock family with Patty recovering in a mental health facility. In the visitors room she issues an ultimatum: Robert must choose between her and Jonah—for the sake of her daughter if nothing else. Rob loves Patty; he’s determined not to abandon his [
second?] wife and step-daughter. But blood ties bind like no other, and Jonah—who unbeknownst to Patty is waiting outside in the car—can be very persuasive
[especially that by now, he has made fortune; if you weave money in this relationship-plot, it might give your text a bit more pungency (?)].
Your text sounds good, rather imaginative. I'd relate it to money matters. May I, in turn, offer you to lend me a hand with my synopsis? It’s an other genre, though, as it is of the Young Adult genre. I welcome you to send me your comments to Monique.Golay@gmail.com.
LITE YEER and the Ghost World – Synopsis
Lite Yeer leads a perfectly normal life with her mom and dad until, one night in her seventh year, her grandmother tells her a disturbing story about their 17th century ancestor Roger Jacot-Guillarmod, a Swiss mercenary and also the lover of Queen Sophie Amelia of Denmark. Of a stormy character, Roger throws his tutor out of the window. On hearing this violent act, Lite panics. Will the poor tutor die? Then Roger will go to prison and all his descendants shall be doomed. Determined to save her family, a mere wish brings Lite to year 1651, right in front of her ancestor’s house. On seeing the tutor plummet from a window, she quickly pushes a cart full of hay to cushion his fall and just narrowly saves him. But the problem is that on returning to her days, a relativist process turns Lite into a baby. She will therefore no longer be accepted by her parents and becomes an orphan.
Be it her luck or not, Màrs, a knowledgeable time-sorcerer, learns about this and wants to do something about it. He is worried that the mother-child separation may be traumatic for Lite. He knows that she has two aunts, Bridget and Gretchen Slugger, of whom the latter breastfeeds twenty-three babies. One of these he decides to take and to swap it with Lite so that she may be raised by her mother’s sister. He indeed counts on this relationship to ease the parting between Lite and her mother. He also expects that the Sluggers will not notice the presence of their niece in their nursery – but they discover the scandal and enslave Lite. She must vacuum clean the floors every day, do the gardening and sleep in the dog house. But when she reaches age eleven Màrs returns. Like a ghost he streams out of Lite’s watch and scares everybody. Ignoring the horrified Sluggers, he informs that Lite has the most unusual and extraordinary gift to travel through time and that she is now living her second life.
To the Sluggers’ fury, he also tells her that, if she wishes to escape from her horrible aunts, she can set off for a new adventure to the past. So Lite, whose life with the Sluggers is a nightmare, sets off for the ghost world which is made up of the people whom she resuscitates by going to their era. Thanks to Màrs’s super-cosmic skill in making the clock run backward, she plunges into the dark and dangerous past of the seventeenth century, but this time in a precise and controlled way: without turning once again into a baby. Her relativist powers delight her, but they also frighten her. She wonders not a little about influencing History and the fate of men. Be it Màrs’s enchantment or not, she recognizes her ancestor Roger and, having now become more bellicose, she helps him put London ablaze. By that way, she has him bear the responsibility of the Great Fire of Year 1666, which enriches her grand-mother’s tales. Indeed, eerie as it may seem, happy days don’t make good tales. On the contrary, fires, fights, or crimes are quite something to listen to and go straight to our memory – with the ages passing by, they become gold.
“The Ghost World” actually starts with the consequence of the plot, Lite’s grand-mother’s stories, which she enlivens by journeying through space and time and by turning her ancestor into a legendary figure. And in doing so, not only does she save the world, but also the entire universe from the destructive folly of the greatest dark elf of all time.
), I am doing, as they say, a cross genre which is likely to be unexplored territory. But I feel taking such a risk is the only way to come with something original.
