by Laura Efron (@lauraefron)
MG Fantasy
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Query
I'm seeking representation for my 60,000-word MG Fantasy, THE FIFTH DIMENSION OF MAGIC. Told in alternating POV by young girls in rival worlds, it combines the adventure and mysterious magic of Miller’s The Hunt for the Hollower, a quirky, ensemble cast a la Symes-Smith’s Sir Callie, and political backdrop as perilous as Smith’s The Deep and Dark Blue.
Ever since 12-year-old Skye's dad left, she's devoted her life to numbers. The number of days since he disappeared (804), the number of dimensions of magic surrounding her (4), the number of people it takes to make said magic work (2 – always twins). Numbers keep her and her best friend safe—until a couple magical brutes rise to power and banish countless non-magicians, including her newfound family. Now Skye’s best chance at overturning the law is teaming up with two struggling twins and conducting a rescue of the magical prisoners across the wall. But between the dragon shapeshifters, deadly desert, and four kids’ constant bickering, their odds don’t look great.
Meanwhile, across that wall where people prefer manners over magic, Princess Tether schemes to commit enough pranks to dodge her miserable future as Queen. Then she discovers the dungeons and finds more than her next misdemeanor: longed-for friendship in the magician prisoners—and hints that her own Queen-of-Manners mom has a perfidious past. Maybe Tether isn't the only unruly royal after all, and if she does become Queen, she can implement her unorthodox ideas to help her friends. But it’s too late to erase her improper past, so the wayward princess plans a prison break instead.
Once in the dungeons, the girls' quests coincide, and soon they must unlearn all they believed true—about themselves, their families, their cities' pasts—and even magic.
I graduated from Lesley University's MFA in Writing for Young People and have since attended the Kimmel Harding Nelson's residency been a member of SCBWI and the Manuscript Academy, and joined Grub Street’s Novel Incubator program. As a public-school teacher for over a decade, I've worked with target age readers from a variety of cultural backgrounds. My short story, The Last Days of Grandymace, was recently published in Etched Onyx Magazine.
This is a standalone with series potential that would explore a coming-of-age, queer love story, drawn from my own experience. Thanks so much for your consideration!
First Five Pages
ANNOUNCEMENT THE SOLSTICE CEREMONIES
4 dazzling spectacles to decide who’ll replace us 8 elders… and determine the fate of our superior city
WHO can compete? Any infiniteer aged 12 or older who’s mastered magic in one of the four dimensions
WHEN will it be? 1 and 3-D ceremonies on the summer solstice 1 and 4-D ceremonies on the winter solstice
WHERE will it be? Quantorium Arena
HOW can you win? Wow us with your edgy ways. If your twin and you prove ingenious enough, it’ll be you on the infinity bench, making the rules for the next fifty years!
Skye’s done the math. The odds of sneaking into this infiniteer-only ceremony with her best friend are bad—ten to one at best. Accounting for Esme’s lack of skill at “sneaky,” more like a hundred.
Skye crouches behind the pillared entrance and peers into the arena, stomach twisting. Her friend, meanwhile, yelps as their old classmates parade by.
“We’re supposed to be sneaking, not squealing,” Skye hisses. “Now get back before someone recognizes you.”
She yanks Ez further into the shadows just as their least favorite twins saunter by. Luckily, the spiky-hair boys are too busy cutting a younger kid in line to notice. Skye bites her lip and turns back to the arena. Before today, she’d only glimpsed the massive room from the stairs to the servant’s quarters. Now, fifth bell hasn’t rung yet and the stadium beyond already teems with infiniteers—those silver-cloaked, wisdom-obsessed magicians who make this city so insufferable. Weekly sermons about the specialness of twins. Mandatory menial labor for everyone else, like Skye and Ez.
The room’s towering metal walls shrill with their bookish banter and discussion of dimensional magic. Overhead, chandeliers the size of small homes glitter in the sunlight streaming through huge windows. The floor seems to stretch as far as the desert dunes that encircle this city. A bead of sweat escapes Skye’s bandana, stinging her eye. Infiltrating the ceremony will probably be the end of her dishwashing days at this fancy school. Are you considering the big picture, Skye-star? Her dad would’ve asked.
But her dad isn’t here. He hasn’t been for 804 days.
At her elbow, Ez leans so far forward, she’s practically hugging the huge column that hides them from the stream of noisy kids. Still, her eyes glitter with that guess-what-I’m-imagining gleam Skye hasn’t seen in a full moon. Heat blooms in Skye’s chest, and she stands. Yes, she might lose her job here at the Quantorium, and with it, her illicit visits to the school’s library. But she, Skye-the-Orphan, just put the shine back in Ez’s eyes.
This once, the numbers don’t count.
“Now you’re gawking,” she whispers.
Ez blushes and elbows her ribs. “Am not!”
Skye grins. “Quick, put this on.” She digs in her pocket for the ceremony staff badges she sewed the night before and tosses one to Ez. Ignoring her friend’s wide-eyed stare, she extracts one shirt and hair wrap from each pant leg. A week of kitchen gossip divulged that the scullery sits just below the front of center stage. So, wrangling her bushy black locks under the scarf, Skye runs the numbers. The arena’s three hundred feet long, and the kitchen location’s half that. So, if they can just find the servant entrance…
“Ceremony staff badges? Serving suits?” Ez isn’t even trying to whisper as she pulls the shirt on. “We’re here to see the 3-Dimensioneer finals, aren’t we? By pretending we’re servants? Wait’ll I tell Ma and Brax!”
Skye releases her breath. Odds are Ez’s Ma won’t be a hundred percent thrilled about their afternoon activities, but her baby brother will devour every detail. Most importantly, her friend is giddy and grinning and talking about something besides how meaningless life without magic is.
“Yup,” Skye whispers. “Happy belated birthday. Try not to get us caught.” Then, ignoring their abysmal odds, she tugs Ez onto the arena floor, straight into the throng of silver-dressed snobs.
#
A gaggle of old men comparing cloak lengths block Skye’s view of the stage, so she dodges left towards the stands, only for a woman yelling about “superior dimensions” to elbow her in the neck. But clutching Ez’s hand, Skye squeezes through and past the gaudy horde, only pausing once they reach the bleachers rimming the room.
“If even one of our old classmates notices us, we’re goners,” Skye mutters, searching for the door that might make this birthday surprise work out. The burnished benches slope three stories up, undulating as though woven from water. Her eyes sting from both the dazzle and a second drop of sweat. Beside her, Ez is gawking again.
How—in the name of all things infinite—did she figure they might not get caught?
Then, blinking, she sees it. There, tucked behind a spiral staircase near the arched entrance sits the one blemish in the whole bejeweled room. A small, rusty-looking slab of wall. The door to the scullery. Where singleton servants will be working—other non-twinned, non-magical unfortunates like her and Ez. Where they can disguise themselves as ceremony staff, serve snacks in the stands, and see the show.
Smiling, Skye pilots them around the perimeter of silver snobs. Then, before Ez can keep gaping, she pushes them through the tiny door. They spill into the blissful blackness of the bleachers’ shadows.
The odds just turned in their favor.
“What, for infinity’s sake, are we doing under the bleachers?” Ez stage whispers. She’s never had Skye’s knack for keeping quiet. In the dim light, Skye sees her friend try to blow the lock of hair from her face. It slides back again.
Skye feels an irrational urge to laugh. “You’ll see.” She tugs Ez down the passage to the right. No point getting into logistics when failure is still so likely. No point dwelling on the enormous library she’ll lose access to if evicted either.
Find the kitchen. That’s the focus.
Even down here, Skye hears the falseness of the pitch in the crowd’s phony conversations above. This Ceremony is a waste of quantum cakes, in her opinion. Sure, she’s glad to see those stuck-up Elders step down from the infinity bench, but to do so believing the next five decades will be better? Their replacements, kinder? Skye grits her teeth. No. Whoever wins the 3-Dimensioneer Ceremony this morning won’t care about the “big picture” her dad believed in, won’t even see singletons as fellow humans. Today will be a bunch of elitist jerks trying to out-innovate each other—ideally, with sparkles.
But last week, Ez turned twelve. So, like all singletons, she was forced to quit school to “serve in a simple way.” From now on, her days will be spent cleaning, cooking for, or constructing infiniteer homes. Because twins need time to refine their magic tricks, of course. Ever since, Ez won’t stop yearning for all things infiniteer.
You’d never believe how pretty the 1-D plaza is at dawn, Skye. It’s like walking on a cloud.
Skye, however, can imagine it. She’s seen it herself. For years she’s spent her nights perched atop the Quantorium’s roof. This mansion-of-a-school, presiding over Quantopolis’ center, has been her best refuge from a now-fatherless shack. And sure, from those heights, Skye’s seen how the rising sun spangles the silver homes in the city’s four districts only to fall flat on her and Ez’s outskirts. But up there, it doesn’t rankle her.
Not the way it rankles Ez.
“Hey, Skye-lou,” Ez says, poking her, “spying is cool, but wouldn’t it be better to dress like twins and storm the stage? Also, I wasn’t entirely joking last week about throwing stink bombs at our old classmates…”
Skye signs Ez to shush. Ez blows at her hair again and grins back. “Well..?”
“No storming.” Skye squints down the dark, curved corridor. “And no stink bombs.” Shouldn’t there be some lights? Overhead, feet plod up the bleacher stairs. Spectators are finding their seats. “Just, follow me and…”
Ez pretends to launch something into the stands while plugging her nose.