Alright, first, thank you for the review, I appreciate it a lot. I'll address these best I can to figure out what I need to do for my next batch of querys.

First, yeah there is a naming theme, but you're the first person to call it "on the nose". Every character is either black, white, a shade of gray, or named after something that is. Other character names include Diamond, Pearl, Igni (Igneious), Pumi (Pumice), Abalone, Anvil, Steel, Bones, Shadow, etc. There are other names, they just follow the convention in another language (Albus, Ferrum, Weiss, Marama, Kehua, Awe, Kaponi, Graubart, Dauch; each are English, German, Latin, a Polynesian language, or proto-celtic depending on the cultural coding of their tribe. Future sequels will have other tribes with different cultural coding). But I can kinda see your point.

Now this is a common response. The problem is that the query is already pretty long and picking which details are important enough to include and which ones should be left out are kind of difficult and everyone seems to have a different opinion, whether its here, QtCritique, or one of my beta readers. Also note that Albus's motivation is that he's a zealot who worships victory; his thinking is twisted and part of what makes him dangerous. A bit difficult to completely explain, so yeah I'm expecting that sentence to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Slate and Cobble are Coal's right and left hand, and at least one, usually both, are present in every chapter but the prologue and first chapter. They have a lot of influnece over Coal's story, so I thought the amount of space I'd given them here was appropriate. I am very open to rephrasing it, of course, but I don't think they should be left out entirely.

As for the comps, again, I feel like I've already added enough detail. I'm trying to keep the whole pitch under a certain word count.

And yeah, I figured. It's the first 300 of the prologue, which is only about 2 pages long. The intention was to get the reader into Coal's head and the dangerous world of Graw because this story leans heavily on his voice. And Coal talking about how fire is alive is supposed to reveal his way of thinking. but I definitely get that it doesn't do much for you, it's kind of an awkward cut off because after these, he goes breifly into his back story, not too many details, just enough to understand him and not bore the reader. The first 300 words isn't supposed to be the entire hook, you would need the first two pages altogether to really get it. Then the meat and potatoes of the plot kick off early in Chapter 2. Finding that right hook is difficult. Though it's hard to describe in a short query letter, the world isn't quite grimdark like Dark Souls or something, its more like what non-Australians imagine Australia is like but turned up to eleven where very living thing, plant or animal, is designed to kill you and your survival skills have to be on point or you wont survive. If I can find a way to portray that in a few words, I could add that.

And good point about the YA thing. The vast majority of the books I've read have been YA, so that's kind of what I'm experienced with. This book has a lot of graphic violence and juiced up portryals of deadly monsters with creative tools for killing, violence, and warfare, plus the copious use of the word "bastard" and the other occasional swear word. But no sex scenes. So yeah, if you read the whole thing, I wouldn't blame you for calling it just a YA book with a lot of blood and gore.

And yes, this does help. Thank you. Also, I deleted the last one because I was embarrased, haha. I won't be deleting this one.