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This week we have the query for THE FIRE LOTUS, a YA urban fantasy from Renee Ahdieh. My overall thoughts are at the end. As always, this is all just my opinion. Your mileage may vary.
Query
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| Nice hook. |
Jia Ryan was supposed to start college in three weeks, not get struck by a bolt of lightning and die in front of her family.
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| I like the voice, but there's a lot of stuff going on here all of a sudden. Simplified sentence structures might help. |
What’s more, she’s pretty sure she wasn’t meant to wake up in a lab days later with a scientist hovering over her, welcoming her into the world of the living dead. Yeah, and that’s not even calling to question the irritatingly serene genie nearby. Or his strange request that she take up arms in their ongoing struggle against reanimated corpses held under the sway of a powerful sorcerer. Right. Not so much, Master Yoda.
After all, this isn’t her fight. She’s only eighteen, for crying out loud.
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| I feel like the questions are getting to be a little much. Just my opinion. |
Wait. She gets to train in a slew of martial arts? Learn how to wield a katana? And, hold the phone, somebody probably should have mentioned that the young samurai teaching her is darkly enigmatic and sexier than sin.
Okay. This might not totally suck.
As she settles into her new role as an undead warrior, Jia soon learns that the aforementioned baddie sorcerer intends to unleash the full brunt of his mind-controlling blood sorcery onto mankind. Once she begins to grasp that the idyllic world she existed in for eighteen years is being threatened, there’s no going back.
This is now her fight.
THE FIRE LOTUS is an 80,000-word work of YA urban fantasy with series potential.
Adam's Thoughts
This is pretty good. I love the voice, and there's a clear conflict here. There's no sadistic choice like I keep harping on, but I think the mentions of samurai and undead warriors sufficiently distracted me from that fact ;-)
One thing to be careful of is to make sure the voice doesn't get in the way. It's a great voice, like I said, but there were a couple of times I felt it was a bit too much. Now that's totally just my opinion; others might feel differently. And really, it's just a nitpick.
And if you did have a sadistic choice to build up to at the end, I think this might be perfect.
But that's just me. What do the rest of you guys think?
Sometimes, a query breaks the rules, and just works. This query isn't perfect, and I agree with Adam the voice almost eclipses the story a little bit here, but I think agents who are fans of martial arts are going to want to see pages here.
ReplyDeleteWow, you have serious voicage here and that can trump other considerations. On a personal note, love the whole Asian fantasy vibe. Yum. I was a little confused that she's woken up as an undead person to fight against the undead. Does that seem unusual to anyone else? So there's a scientist, a genie and a very cool Samurai - all of which makes it feel a little cluttered. Again, cool voice might trump all other considerations. I'd have to agree with Adam that a sadistic choice thrown in would certainly help sweeten the candy.
ReplyDeleteI like the voice and I think the hook is awesome. My concern is that there were too many characters thrown in too fast. Do you need the scientist and the genie?
ReplyDeletePlus, if she's 18 and ready for college, shouldn't this novel be labeled NA instead of YA?
Thanks so much for the feedback, everyone! This rocks all kinds of awesome :-)
ReplyDeleteBelow, I submitted a tentative reworking of the query based on Adam's excellent suggestions and your much-appreciated commentary.
Again, please don't hesitate to offer more feedback! I'm all about having a query that rises from the ashes like a friggin' phoenix! :-)
I'd love to include something that touches on Jia's "sadistic choice" -- but I'm afraid of over-complicating the query with the addition of more secondary characters and an underlying plotline that's somewhat difficult to explain succinctly (at least, for me, haha). Every time I try to delve into it, I feel like I start falling back on cliches and catchphrases, which, of course, don't work for this purpose. In a nutshell (cliche number one!), she learns that the world is not as black and white as it seems (number two!), and that evil is often garbed in a mantle we least expect. So . . . HALP? :-D
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Jia Ryan was supposed to start college in three weeks, not get struck by a bolt of lightning and die in front of her family.
What’s more, she’s pretty sure she wasn’t meant to wake up in a lab days later with a scientist welcoming her into the world of the living dead. And that's not even calling to question his strange request that she take up arms in their struggle against reanimated corpses held under the sway of a powerful sorcerer. Right. Not so much.
After all, this isn’t her fight. She’s only eighteen, for crying out loud.
Wait. She gets to train in a slew of martial arts? Learn how to wield a katana? And, hold the phone, somebody probably should have mentioned that the young samurai teaching her is darkly enigmatic and sexier than sin.
Okay. This might not totally suck.
As she settles into her new role as an undead warrior, Jia soon learns that the aforementioned sorcerer intends to unleash the full brunt of his mind-controlling blood sorcery onto mankind. Once she begins to grasp that the idyllic world she existed in for eighteen years is being threatened, there’s no going back.
This is now her fight.
THE FIRE LOTUS is an 80,000-word YA urban fantasy with series potential.
I like the tightening you've incorporated, but feel that you still tighten some more. For example you could reword the whole last paragraph to "When Jia learns the sorcerer intends to unleash the full brunt of his undead (or whatever you want to call them that isn't a repetition of reanimated corpses)onto mankind there's no going back. This is now her fight."
ReplyDeleteLike Victoria above, I think you could also make a much bigger distinction between the reanimated corpses and Jia being an undead warrior. The two are too similar. I think you could leave the 'living dead' reference in the second paragraph, but drop any reference to what Jia is in the rest of the query.
You don't need to reinforce/repeat "the idyllic world she existed in for eighteen years" or "She's only eighteen, for crying out loud" because we already know she was supposed to start college and we have worked out her age. We don't need to be told three times.