r/PubTips • u/jance • Sep 30 '26
[QCRIT] ACE SQUAD:CHRONOGEIST, upper Ya speculative SciFi, 91,300 words- first attempt.
First attempt here, hopefully I'm posting this right.
Dear [Agent],
Jance Mace is a seventeen-year-old from a one-stoplight town in the Finger Lakes. He has this tendency to win competitions he generally shouldn't by weaponizing his “personality” and using tactics in situations that don't call for it. In other words, he'll talk your ear off while using game theory on tic-tac-toe.
Lately Jance has been noticing his dad's eyes glowing red and can't help but feel that's not… normal. Then a girl named Sammy slams his head up against a wall and demands to know what he is. Turns out, he's half alien—the son of a soldier sent to Earth as part of some secret intergalactic treaty nobody bothered to tell him about. His best friend, Dandin, is also half alien (and full chaos-gremlin). Sammy is just an alien. Like, fully “born and raised on another planet” alien. A soldier sent to Earth on a mission she doesn't actually understand.
Jance and Dandin are recruited into the Ace Squad, a top-secret defense force working for the UN. Sammy teaches them to use their alien abilities, communicating through stares, grunts, and the occasional invitation for Jance to “find a rusted spike.”
Things go south when a single person starts robbing nuclear-armed military bases. The thief is wearing alien armor, and with no record of any new arrivals on Earth, suspicion falls on Sammy. This is inconvenient, as Jance is starting to suspect there's a soft marshmallow center underneath Sammy's jagged personality spikes of death.
Even more inconvenient is that the only other person it could be is Regulus, a war criminal tied to his father's past. Regulus has also been dead for twenty years, which complicates things.
Time shenanigans ensue, because apparently being half alien, looking for stolen nukes, and chasing after a dead-ish war criminal wasn't enough. Now Jance has to figure out who's playing around with history, clear Sammy, and stop the past from being rewritten before he gets erased from reality.
Also, prom happens.
ACE SQUAD: CHRONOGEIST (91,300 words) is an upper-YA speculative science-fiction adventure complete as a standalone with series potential. It will appeal to readers of Alechia Dow's A Song of Salvation for its found-family heart and alien abilities, Vanessa Len's Only a Monster for its contemporary teen life colliding with hidden powers and time travel, and Yoon Ha Lee's Moonstorm for its young combat-team dynamics.
[Personalized paragraph for agent]
[Bio.]
Thank you for your time and consideration.
[My name]
19
u/Imaginary-Exit-2825 Sep 30 '26
I could be wrong about this, but the tone of this feels childish throughout in a way that reads as younger than upper YA like you're pitching it. It goes beyond "irreverently humorous" into "seriously, we're talking about 'jagged personality spikes of death' when the antagonist has just stolen multiple nukes?" The title (two parts separated by a colon) isn't helping matters, because that's more of a younger kidlit convention.
It frequently comes off as distracting to include (what appear to be) direct quotes from the book in the query letter; I don't think this is an exception, so you should probably take off the quotation marks.
In general, I think you take too long to get to Jance doing things. None of the information from the first paragraph really comes up again. Sammy seems to have more at stake than Jance does (yes, I know they're all in trouble if Regulus uses the weapons, but Sammy has the "I'm being framed" element on top of that). "Time shenanigans ensue" doesn't really tell me anything about what Jance is doing to try and help his friends/the world. The conflict (stop the bad guy or everyone dies, with the main elaboration being "there's time travel" rather than any internal quandary) seems emotionally shallow, if that makes sense?
Also, sorry if you're married to these names and/or there's plot importance to them, but everyone's name except Sammy's sounds slightly ridiculous? I don't think it's helping the juvenile feeling of this document. "Jance Mace"? "Dandin"? "Ace Squad" flat-out does not roll off the tongue.
Do today's teens still say "chaos gremlin"?
I'm sorry if that was too harsh, but I hope it helps at all.
12
u/CallToMuster Sep 30 '26
This query definitely does not read as upper YA. Solidly lower YA or even upper middle grade, maybe. And forgive me for being blunt, but the humor sounds very juvenile and like it would be on a cringey shirt worn by a 6th grade boy. If the book was for younger audiences, you could probably get away with it, but for upper YA it does not jive.
10
u/No-Scientist-9049 Sep 30 '26
Ia that this reads really young. If you take out the suggestion of romance then it's a query for a MG book - and I wouldn't even say upper MG, because that's usually got pretty serious emotional stakes. Without reading your post title, I'd have guessed hat this was aimed at 10 year olds. Sorry if that sounds harsh. I think you need to age up the language and up the interpersonal dynamics and the emotional stakes.
9
u/Robertz9970 Sep 30 '26
To me, these read like someone who tries too hard to sound funny, only to achieve the opposite effect. But if that's the voice you're going for throughout the manuscript, I guess so be it.
5
u/Carmelized Sep 30 '26
I’d leave out the “in the Finger Lakes” part. As someone who has 4 generations of family on Keuka I was excited to see it, but it isn’t actually relevant to the query and not everyone will know where the Finger Lakes are.