Pangu's Shadow
by Karen Bao Carolrhoda2024Query Letter
[Personalized pitch], I hope you will be interested in representing PANGU’S SHADOW, a 70,000-word YA sci-fi mystery that I call “Murder on the Exoplanet Express with queer science girls.”
12:35 a.m. Biological Laboratories, Pangu Star System. A fire alarm interrupts Ver Yun’s and Aryl Fielding’s science experiments. When the blaring stops, their teacher is sprawled on the floor, dead—and they’re the prime suspects for his murder.
Ver left her home moon to study the life-threatening disease wracking her body. Her rival, Aryl, just wants to finish her research apprenticeship for the résumé boost. But now, they’re saddled with mugshot holograms, their trial date is rapidly approaching, and the only foreseeable future for these “no-good” migrant girls is life sentences in prison. That is, unless they put aside their suspicion of each other and team up long enough to clear their names.
Everywhere Ver and Aryl look, someone has a secret worth killing to protect: their delinquent labmates, their teacher’s genius wife, the powerful biotech firm funding their lab, and their respective childhood friends. As the girls rush to collect chemical traces and soundbites while fleeing across the star system, it’s a race against the cosmic clock. Can they uncover the truth behind their teacher’s murder? And if they do, will they be allowed to live?
I’m the author of the YA sci-fi novels DOVE ARISING, DOVE EXILED, and DOVE ALIGHT (Viking/Penguin). I’m also a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience at Harvard University. PANGU’S SHADOW was inspired by my childhood as the daughter of Chinese asylum-seekers, an injury that left me walking with a cane for two years, and all the wonderful, wacky things I’ve experienced as a queer female scientist. The novel's first XX pages are included below.
About
Age Range
Young Adult
Genre
Mystery
Word Count
70,000
Book Link
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pangus-shadow-karen-bao/1143641089
Agent
Veronica Park
Query Stats
Number of Queries Sent
~10
Number of Full Requests Received
~5
Number of Offers of Representation
2
Number of Months Spent Querying This Novel
4 months
Years Spent Writing Before Getting an Offer
6
Number of Manuscripts Queried Before This One
1
Publication Status of The Book Queried
Published (Independent /Boutique / Indy Publisher)
Years Spent Writing Before This Book was Published
8? I was with another agency before.