Successful Queries: Peter Knapp, Stuti Telidevara, and “Queen of Faces,” by Petra Lord

Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find a query letter to agents Peter Knapp and Stuti Telidevara for Petra Lord's debut novel, Queen of Faces.

Petra Lord is a biracial trans author. She has a BFA in TV Writing from New York University, which she uses to recommend TV shows to her parents and predict the endings of movies. She's currently based in Los Angeles, where she feeds her dual addictions to hot pot and Korean barbecue and sustains herself off videos of her cat. Queen of Faces is her debut novel. Follow her on Instagram.

Dear AGENT,

Anabelle Gage is trapped in a boy’s body, and it’s rotting from the inside out.

In the nation of Caimor, wealthy souls buy and swap fabricated bodies like clothes. But Ana works as a scullery maid, and can only afford a grey, withering form for herself. By her seventeenth birthday, it’s already falling apart. In a year, it’ll be dust. Ana dreams of attending Paragon Academy, Caimor’s elite magic school, that can cure her condition and fill her life with adventure. But they reject her application, crushing her hopes of survival.

Ana tries to steal a body by using her budding illusion magic, but a Paragon professor captures her. He makes her an offer: Ana can become a mercenary witch for him, taking on dangerous, illegal jobs to defend the nation. Desperate, Ana accepts. If she earns the cash for a new body, she can escape her old one before it kills her.

Revolt brews in Caimor’s smog-choked underworld, and Paragon hides vicious secrets. Ana proves deadly with knife-work, with glamour and the dance of deceit. But as she kills for the school of her dreams, she begins to suspect she’s fighting for the wrong heroes.

QUEEN OF FACES (106,000 words) is YA fantasy. It features a majority-transgender cast, and explores themes of oppression, identity, and the joy of becoming yourself.

It will appeal to fans of Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN and Chloe Gong’s THESE VIOLENT DELIGHTS.

An early draft of this book was posted online for free from 2019-2021, where it garnered over 300,000 reads from a mostly adult audience. It has been significantly revised and shortened for YA readers. It can stand alone, but I envision it as the first of a potential series.

I am a biracial trans woman, with a BFA in TV Writing from NYU. This is my debut novel. I have an active mailing list. I hope that one day, my writing can bankroll my ravenous addiction to Korean barbecue.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Petra Lord

Bookshop | Amazon

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Petra's query is so attention-grabbing right from those first two lines, versions of those phrases—the body that's "rotting from the inside out," the magical elite "swapping bodies like clothes"—stayed in the pitch we shared with editors on submission, and made it all the way to the book’s official retail copy. It is obviously a fantastic, fresh premise, but even more impressive is how Petra was able to sum it up so concisely, and very smartly lead with it. This is a world where souls can move between bodies, and a girl is trapped in a male body and needs to get out of it. A lot of queries risk burying the lede—what makes the book interesting, and unique—but Petra sidestepped that issue right away.

From that hook, the query makes sure to highlight the protagonist's emotional arc. We understand Ana's desperate circumstances, both literal and internal, and it's clear to us that this is a character with strong motivations. So much of reader investment comes from knowing what the character wants and caring about them getting it, and we often find ourselves having to excavate that want within the pages. Again, Petra astutely recognized that strong drive and threaded it through the query—not least because she spent a long time with this story before it ever came to us. 

Finally, the promising, vivid setting of this rundown city's underworld and its knife-wielding assassin give way to a tantalizing thematic note that proves the perfect conclusion: that our protagonist will discover she's been on the wrong side all along, and will have to reevaluate who her heroes are. Consider our interest captured! On a literal, plot level, this suggests some exciting revelations and plot twists, which we are looking for in a pacy commercial fantasy read.

But what we love about this promise is that it suggests the book is interested in something deeper. It has something to say about those in power, and the very structures Ana is trying to navigate all through the book—structures that we are rooting for her to upend. Even if this phrase didn't make it verbatim into the retail copy, it's still the note the copy ends on. The emotional story this query tells speaks to a writer with a real confidence in her characters and her book—indeed, exactly the kind of writer Petra is.

Some authors get the unicorn treatment when they query. Buckets of full requests, rapid replies, tons of interest from the start. For most, it's more like crawling over broken glass on your hands and knees. Picture an unemployed 20-something crying in the shower after the third dozen rejection, and you'll get a pretty good idea of my experience.

I spent many drafts carefully honing my letter, studying Query Shark, the blog of the late, great agent Janet Reid. When I thought it was perfect, I sent it out, and got back almost nothing for months. Rejections, silence, one lone full request. Querying took me half a year, and I spent most of it convinced I would never get an agent.

The agents I ended up signing with were actually in the very first batch I'd sent out—I assumed they'd rejected me, since it had been so long, so I was genuinely surprised when they sent a full request, and even more surprised when they made an offer just days later.

When we went on submission with the book, it got the full unicorn treatment: the first UK pre-empt came in less than a week, and the US auction soon after. All this to say: having it rough in the query trenches doesn't mean your book is bad, or your pitch isn't working. Querying just sucks sometimes.

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Peter Knapp is a partner and agent at Park, Fine & Brower Literary Management, representing adult, young adult, and middle grade fiction. What drew him to the agenting side of the business is not just what he likes working on, but also who he likes working with: authors with big career ambitions and something to say. He is always on the hunt for smart commercial and upmarket fiction, and is particularly eager to add more breakout adult fiction and standout middle grade, across genres, to his list in 2026. He is a graduate of New York University, and now lives in Brooklyn with his husband.

Stuti Telidevara works on sharp, commercial adult, young adult, and middle grade fiction. She is looking for diverse storytellers and vivid, detailed world-building across genre, and fiction with a strong, high-concept hook. She holds a B.A. in English from Harvard University and spends her free time listening to history podcasts and brewing perfect cups of tea.