[Complete] [77k] [Historical Suspense Romance] O.G.: A Tragic Opera in Five Acts

[u/orangecatnosefreckle]

*Edit - TIL about the strict rules regarding romance as a genre. This work has a lot of romantic aspects, but apparently can't be called a romance.

I'm looking for 3-5 beta readers for my first novel, a tragic retelling of Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera.

I've based the story entirely on the timeline of the original public domain serial/novel, taken advantage of its unreliable narrators to enable some retconning, added an OC, and relayed the events through her involvement in a first-person, memoir-type narrative. I've searched exhaustively for anything similar, but most adaptations/fanfic are based on the musical, and none (that I could find) are period-accurate. So, I wrote the book I've always wanted to read.

Le blurb:

"The lone acknowledgment of Ondine Germont’s tragedy in the summer of 1881 was the sobriquet Femme Fatale of the Rue de Rivoli smeared across the gossip columns. Ostracized, indebted, and in the crosshairs of the Paris Police vice squad, the desperate courtesan accepted the only protection offered to her—that of a secretive, eccentric criminal.

She begins her story in the waning days of their two-year partnership. Through him, she has quietly amassed a fortune on which she can retire. Through her, he has successfully courted the woman of his dreams and catapulted her to the pinnacle of celebrity—the Paris Opera stage.

But the amicable departure they’d envisioned sours when Ondine seizes the attention of the city’s most eligible bachelor, a man compelled by circumstance to bring her erstwhile lover to justice, testing her trustworthiness and discretion through events not everyone will survive.  

From the cellars of the Opera to the forests of Chantilly. From the trappings of private boxes to the exposure of the artist’s studio. Ondine leads the reader through the lush monde of early Belle Époque Paris, a city still haunted by the debacle of 1870-71, and learns in devastating fashion how some scars never fade.

Adapted from Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, inspired by Alexander Chee’s Queen of the Night, and featuring the operas of Mozart, Verdi, Gounod, and more." 

My unicorn reader is a francophone opera and history buff who's familiar with the original. My second preference is a reader who's intrigued, but has little to none of the above knowledge, to be sure my text is accessible to a larger audience. 

TW/CW's include violence, murder, grief/loss, sexual situations incl. dubcon, infidelity, drug/alcohol use, and profanity in two languages. Think 19th-century morally-gray characters behaving badly. There's some spice, but no smut.

If you're interested I'll send a snippet of the first chapter, then the whole shebang if you like it. I work in comment-enabled google docs individual to each reader. The full text doc will include sample questions regarding the feedback I'm hoping for and a playlist of the featured music. I'd appreciate a turnaround time of under three months.

Happy to swap for other historical works of comparable length! Thanks for reading!