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WORK TITLE: Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology
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WEBSITE: https://www.angelahh.com/
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Kirkus Reviews Apr. 1, 2025, review of Hsieh, Angela: LU AND REN’S GUIDE TO GEOZOOLOGY.
School Library Journal vol. 71 no. 4 Apr., 2025. Sullivan, Lauren. , “HSIEH, Angela. Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology.”.
Booklist vol. 121 no. 17-18 May, 2025. Hunter, Sarah. , “Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology.”.
Angela is a Taiwanese American illustrator and author whose life choices can mostly be explained by her love of goofy animals. Her life experiences include fireman-carrying a sedated bear cub and catching a belligerent wallaby.**
**She also wishes to include a disclaimer that this all occurred while working in zoos and wildlife centers so as not to encourage this kind of behavior in the wild.
Her debut graphic novel, LU & REN’S GUIDE TO GEOZOOLOGY, was chosen as a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection and received a starred review from Booklist. She also illustrated the critically acclaimed nonfiction STEM book, ANTARCTICA: THE MELTING CONTINENT.
Interview with Author Angela Hsieh and her graphic novel: Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology
Welcome to From the Mixed-Up Files, Angela! It’s a pleasure to talk to you about your amazing graphic novel, Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology. The graphic novel was released on May 27, 2025, by Quill Tree Books (HarperCollins). Here’s the blurb from Bookshop.org:
Lu dreams of being a great adventurer, just like her ah-ma, who is a world-renowned geozoologist. Ah-ma has traveled far and wide, researching unique animals like dreamy cloud-jellies, enormous sunfish, and playful mossgoats. There’s nothing Lu loves more than reading Ah-ma’s letters about her quests, even if she and her mom struggle to understand the Cylian language Ah-ma writes in.
But when Ah-ma’s letters suddenly stop, Lu becomes worried. So when a nearby town needs a geozoologist, Lu decides to go on the journey to find Ah-ma. She charts a course with the help of Ren, an old friend turned new travel buddy.
As they follow in Ah-ma’s footsteps, Lu begins to discover the complex relationships between geofauna—and between people. What stories has Ah-ma never told her? And what’s Ren hiding from her?
What is Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology’s origin story?
As I get to know myself as an artist and writer, I’m realizing that there’s no one single origin for any of my stories. Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology is a combination of things I love and that have shaped my life: animals and nature, the relationships with the people around me, and growing up as part of the Taiwanese American diaspora. That being said, I can show you the very first illustration I ever made in the world of Geozoology:
Several years ago, I made a birthday illustration for a friend who really loves guinea pigs. My thought process was: “What if guinea pig… but BIGGER?” To really set the scene, I wrote a short travel postcard-style description on the back with fun facts about this guinea pig mountain’s behavior and ecology.
Needless to say, my friend loved it. So did a lot of other people, it turned out. So I set about drawing more giant landscape-animals (with proto-Lu for scale) and writing facts about them. The project transformed several times: from a series of illustrations that I thought I might turn into a calendar, to a picture book, to a graphic novel (though one very different from the Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology that was eventually published).
Four years passed between that initial illustration and signing the contract for the book; another four passed before it was published. That’s a lot of years for ideas to meld together, come apart, and change. That’s also a lot of time for me to change as an artist.
Can you share Angela Hsieh’s origin story as well?
I was one of those kids who loved reading and drawing. I had a vague idea that it’d be cool to make a book one day, but I wasn’t one of those “one day I’ll grow up to be an author” kids, you know? I read lots of manga and comics and watched a lot of animated films, so I knew that other people were out there making cool stories, but it all felt impossibly distant for me. I also thought I’d be going into the medical field for the majority of my education, so making my own stories was lower on my list of priorities for a long time.
I don’t think there’s any one specific turning point in my life when I decided to make my own book, but rather a collection of events that led me down this path. One such moment was walking into my local Barnes & Noble as a high schooler and picking up the Flight comics anthology. Until then, I thought of comics as either 20-volume epic manga series (unattainable by its enormity) or daily funnies (something I enjoyed but didn’t want to make). Reading Flight made me feel like making comics could be an achievable goal. The seed was planted. I didn’t do anything with this revelation until about 15 years later, after I’d gotten an undergraduate degree in biology and finished my illustration degree, but I got there eventually.
When did drawing evolve into visual storytelling for you? Have you always been drawn to telling stories with your art, or is it more of a long and winding path to get where you are today?
I both drew and wrote from a young age, but I didn’t really take the idea of combining the two seriously until I was an adult. And even then, I didn’t find my way to comics until after I graduated from art school. I thought I’d be an editorial illustrator, which often requires a more symbolic/conceptual approach than a narrative one (though the two aren’t mutually exclusive). I found myself more drawn to the narrative approach than the conceptual one. I realized the things I wanted to say could not be encompassed by one illustration.
To be completely honest, I resisted making comics for a long time because of the amount of time and work they require. But at some point, I came to the conclusion that they’re the best medium to tell the kinds of stories I want to tell (at least for now), so I just had to take the dive.
As a MUF STEM Tuesday contributor and career scientist, my reader’s radar activates when I see STEM used in a fantasy story. You used real-life science and nature in Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology to create a believable world by grounding the fantasy with recognizable natural elements. How important was it to you to get the natural elements right, but with enough fantastical elements to engage the reader?
I hope I got that balance right! I was a nerd child who read Audubon’s First Field Guide: Birds from cover to cover. I also loved reading the Pokédex entries in Pokémon. Since Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology is more about exploring and learning about the world and less about, say, which geofauna would win in a wrestling match, I aimed for somewhere in between Pokémon and Audubon’s First Field Guide on the spectrum of fantastical to factual.
In terms of telling a compelling story, the balance was less about fantastical vs. realistic and more about weaving the science-y stuff into the plot to such a degree that learning about the world felt like a natural progression of the story. I tried to approach worldbuilding in, well, a scientific way. If I change one thing (i.e., there are big animal mountains), what else will change? In a world where people have to live among these big animal mountains that move around, how would people interact with them? Some people, like Lu and Ah-ma, would try to learn as much as possible about them. If we follow these characters, we’ll learn about the world through their eyes.
The geofauna’s behavior is based on that of real animals, and their geological features are based on real-life locations. The most fantastical things about them are that they’re (a) huge, and (b) made of rocks. Otherwise, most of their biology and ecology is pretty similar to the way nature works in real life. I didn’t feel the need to put a fantastical spin on something like hydrangeas changing color based on soil pH because it tied in neatly into the world and the story I was trying to tell. And because the natural world is already pretty magical, if you ask me.
One part of your book I enjoyed was the use of the Cylian (Mandarin Chinese) language heritage to drive Lu’s interest, need, and frustration in understanding Ah-ma’s writings from her letters and travel journals. How challenging was it to incorporate the Cylian language into the story? (You did a beautiful job of this, by the way!)
Thank you! I very quickly came to the conclusion that whenever written Cylian showed up on the page, it would not be actual Chinese. The practical reason: My Chinese is not nearly at the level required to write letters, much less scientific field notes. The conceptual reason: Even readers who can read Chinese wouldn’t be able to read Cylian, so all readers would be put in Lu’s shoes when she struggles with the language barrier.
My parents sent me to Chinese school when I was a kid, so my hand still remembers the shapes of the characters, even though I’ve largely forgotten what they mean. I was able to write characters that resembled Chinese, which, upon closer inspection, were incomprehensible. I took a lot of inspiration from Xu Bing’s installation, A Book from the Sky. I wasn’t aiming for semantic meaning as much as I was aiming for the emotional tension you feel when looking at something you “should” understand but just can’t wrap your mind around.
Like many second-generation Asian Americans, I speak my parents’ mother tongue all right, even if my reading and writing leave much to be desired. My team and I went back and forth a couple of times when trying to figure out how best to represent Cylian (Mandarin Chinese) vs. Lirrish (English) dialog. We tried chevrons and colored speech bubbles, but we ultimately decided that the most elegant solution was to use colored text (purple for Cylian, black for Lirrish) and add a short note at the beginning to explain the difference to readers. The reader, like myself and Lu, will be able to understand spoken Cylian, but be at a loss when confronted with the written form.
The drive Lu feels to understand the language deepens her connection with Ah-ma and reveals her strong curiosity about the world. How did you connect Lu’s curiosity to her problem-solving skills of following Ah-ma’s trail?
Curiosity and problem-solving often go hand-in-hand in real life. I find that people who want to understand how the world works are also the same people who’re driven to create interesting solutions to challenges. It only made sense to me that a curious kid like Lu would try to understand the world as her ah-ma, her idol, would see it in order to find where she’s gone. Lu wants to know things. The only way to know things is to go out and find answers!
Page 70 might be my favorite page of the book. It’s a masterclass on how to represent the passage of time and space on a single page. The four panels at the top of the page depict the passage from night to dawn and are set over a sweeping landscape establishing shot of Lu and Ren entering Ambyton. (Wonderful work in my opinion!) How difficult was it to come up with a solution to the problem of representing time and distance in such a compact space?
Thank you! Playing with the passage of time is one of my favorite things to explore in comics, right up there with the page turn. It makes me feel clever when I’m able to pull it off, haha. One of the interesting challenges of making a graphic novel that involves a lot of traveling is showing the days on the road without the story dragging or the pages getting repetitive, but still getting across to the reader that days or weeks have passed. On a comic page, the gutter—that is, the space between the panels—represents the passage of time. More, smaller panels will slow the reader’s eye down and make it feel like more time has passed. It’s one of those things that I didn’t think about consciously when I was just reading and not yet making comics, but now that I’m creating comics, I’ve learned it can be used to great effect when done with intention.
For this particular page, it wouldn’t say it was terribly difficult—mostly because I’d been itching to use this technique ever since seeing other artists do it. Shaun Tan has a breathtakingly understated spread in The Arrival that depicts a lengthy journey by ship via the changing shapes of the clouds, day by day, in a grid of sixty square panels. This is followed by a page turn to a splash page of the ship on the ocean, a small shape dwarfed by the cumulonimbus clouds towering above it. Just gorgeous. When I see someone do something well, I want to try it too.
As creators, we are interested in the creative processes of other creators. In my graphic novel critique group, it’s an oft-discussed topic. Three members of our group are sketch-to-script creators, while I’m firmly grounded in the script-to-sketches camp. For your graphic novels, what’s your approach?
You can’t see me, but I’m giving you a script-to-sketches fist bump. I do some visual development ahead of time for characters and locations, but when it comes to the story, I have to write it down first. I don’t draw very fast, so I want to make sure the beats and pacing are right before I commit to drawing hundreds of pages. I work in a fairly straightforward way, from script to thumbnails to sketches/pencils to colors. (Since I worked in a lineless style for Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology, I skipped inks and went straight to colors.)
Having the script first means I can plan for putting speech bubbles on the page from the moment I begin drawing the book. I always make sure to plan the layout of the speech bubbles when I thumbnail. Dialog takes up a lot of space! Even with a “finished” script, I ended up cutting lines as I drew, trying to keep only what was necessary so that the pages didn’t feel overly cluttered.
Do you have a critique group or a group of fellow creators/friends with whom you bounce your work and ideas off?
I do! I’m part of a few groups, both local and online. I’ve got a couple of trusted friends who see the early stages of my work, before they’re anything near a fleshed-out story, and I’ve got critique partners who see the more refined draft and help me work out the rough spots. I try not to bring too many critique partners into any particular story I’m working on. There’s definitely such a thing as too many cooks in the kitchen.
I’ve got to give a special shoutout to Middle Grade Escapades. It’s not a critique group, per se; it’s a marketing collective made up of 2025 middle grade debut authors. It’s been invaluable to have the support of folks who’re also going through the same roller coaster of an experience that is putting a book out in the world.
Apart from art and your creative practice, how do you spend your free time?
I’m a big believer in doing things that aren’t directly related to my creative practice. It both expands my world and gives me things to make art about. I love baking. My sourdough starter from 2020 is still alive and contributing focaccia to the household. I also practice (very amateur) bonsai. Every time I pass my window, I can’t help but stop and stare at the little garden we’ve got out there. One of my favorite things to do is hang out on my couch with a book or a crochet project and a cat on my lap. I play D&D and do my best to carve out time to spend with friends.
After the release of Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology into the world, what’s next on your plate? Book promotion? School visits? Back to work on the next graphic novel?
I’ve spent my summer jetting about the US on my self-styled “book tour”—as of writing this, I’ve just gotten back from the wonderful Bigfoot Kids’ Book Festival in Washington—and I’m ready to hibernate in my apartment and just work on my next book! Though I met many wonderful readers and fellow authors this year, book promotion takes a lot out of me, and I found myself without any energy left to create. I’m looking forward to getting back into the rhythm of making things again.
The From the Mixed-Up Files family wishes you and Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology the very best of luck, and hope it finds its readers! Thank you, Angela, for being our guest! Your book is absolutely fantastic.
Thank you so much for having me, Mike!
Meet Angela Hsieh
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May 1, 2025
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We recently connected with Angela Hsieh and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Angela thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
I grew up in a house full of sound—my sister on clarinet, my brother and I on violin, all of us on piano. At any moment, someone was either flying through a scale or stuck replaying the same bar of music for the thirteenth time. For a solid decade, we sounded terrible and the household was chaos. I feel bad, but also grateful our parents stuck with it. They were the ones who started it—Taiwanese immigrants who moved to New York in their early teens. They couldn’t afford a piano, so my mom practiced on a paper keyboard taped to her desk. They moved often—eventually landing in San Francisco, raising us three kids, and later relocating to Shanghai, China when I was three.
Growing up in China as a Taiwanese American, my parents always instilled in me the importance of exploring music and speaking both languages fluently. One of their favorite stories to share is the one when I was three. It all began while they were watching a Chinese period drama with a really distinct theme song. Shortly after, they described how I climbed onto the piano bench and started playing the theme song. I don’t quite remember that, but I do remember being eight, playing along to The Lion King on VHS, trying to match the emotion on screen.
Fast forward to high school, I had my first clunky Windows laptop and started recording into Sound Recorder—the one with the red circle button. You could only record 60 seconds unless you hacked it, which of course I tried. No MIDI, just raw audio and lots of clipping when I tried to layer beats, keys, and violin. I saved it all in a private folder—my little archive nobody knew about.
Because of my parent’s upbringing, music was never framed as a career path—it was just something you did. You practiced, even when you didn’t want to. To them, practicing an instrument every day teaches perseverance, patience, and attention to detail. Creative careers—especially music—are seen as unstable and financially risky. For immigrant parents especially, who may have sacrificed a lot for the next generation’s future, the idea of “being an artist” didn’t align with their definition of success or security. Pursuing music professionally often felt like gambling with your future.
Somewhere in those in-between moments, I started to find my voice through music. I played piano at home and violin in school orchestras throughout middle and high school, often performing film scores—Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and other early 2000s blockbusters. I knew I wouldn’t follow the classical path forever, but I was drawn to how music worked in film. It didn’t have to take the spotlight to be powerful—it could sit quietly beneath a scene and shift the entire mood.
I remember looking up Hans Zimmer in high school and not finding any information on Wikipedia. Film scoring felt like a totally distant world—something other people did. Still, I kept following that curiosity. When I left Shanghai for college in Berkeley, I put composing on full pause, and with it, any belief that music could be my future. I found myself in finance in New York. Two years in, I realized I had to experience the farthest thing from music to finally be sure I was ready to come back to exploring this world again.
Angela, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I’m a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Los Angeles, creating music for film, dance, and visual media. My work spans a range of formats—scoring documentaries, collaborating with choreographers, building live performance pieces, and composing original music across disciplines. At the core of it all, I use sound as a way to tell stories, hold emotion, and connect across experiences.
Over time, my sound has evolved to blend orchestral textures with electronic, ambient, and folk elements. I also play the erhu, a traditional Chinese string instrument I’ve been reconnecting with in recent years—it’s become both a creative tool and a way to explore my cultural roots through music.
I’m especially drawn to cross-cultural or multi-disciplinary collaborations —projects that exist in the in-between, where identities overlap and different influences blend together. Having lived in different cities and moved between cultures—from the fast pace of New York life to the layered contrasts of Shanghai to the political openness of Berkeley, where I studied—I’ve learned to pay close attention to the textures of people and place. All of these experiences have influenced my perspective, and music has become a natural outlet for the things I observe and absorb.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
At the core of my creative journey is a curiosity about the world. Some of my favorite cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary collaborations focused on identity, third culture experiences, nature, human relationships, social impact, and movement.
My mom is Buddhist, and growing up, besides the endless squeaks from music practice, our home was often filled with chanting—wood blocks clicking, rhythms repeating, pots clattering in the kitchen. My parents regularly hosted sessions in our living room. My dad also had us running at 6 a.m. every other day, rain or shine, starting when we were tiny. At the time, none of it made much sense, but looking back, that rhythm and structure stayed with me. I think it’s part of why I’m drawn to work that feels thoughtful, layered, and grounded in something deeper than what’s immediately visible—work that leans into the importance of mental and physical care, and leaves space for processing.
Scoring documentaries has become one of the most fulfilling parts of my craft. I worked on a film about a Nepalese woman who returned home to start an art center after surviving trafficking, and another about a climber who summited El Capitan after years of being underestimated. I love the challenge of turning lived experience into sound and spend a lot of time shaping textures and tones through my instruments. The goal is always to support the emotional landscape of the story. I’d love to score a film for A24 or National Geographic someday—these works often live in emotional gray areas or expansive natural spaces where music can really breathe.
Last year, I had the opportunity to tour with my close friend and collaborator ONIKHO across Taiwan, Japan, and most recently Palm Springs. One of the highlights was performing with Resident Island Dance Theatre, a physically integrated dance company. Their work redefines movement by bringing together dancers of all abilities, creating performances that are both powerful and deeply human. I played electric violin live to a piece ONIKHO, Holly Mead, and myself created through shared improvisation. This was one of the most rewarding multi-media collaborations I’ve done and the experience reminded me that music is really about connecting and listening. Being in Taiwan was also especially meaningful—it’s where my parents are from, and having them there felt like a beautiful thing we got to share.
Have you ever had to pivot?
One of the biggest pivots in my life was leaving finance to return to music. I grew up in Shanghai in the late ’90s—before the high-rises and bullet trains—when the city was still a patchwork of old tile buildings, street food stalls, and tangled power lines, moving between international school in English by day and orchestra rehearsals in Chinese after class, weaving through the streets with my friends, siblings, and violin case. Life moved fast—structured and chaotic, modern and traditional—and even when I wasn’t composing, music was how I found quiet within the noise.
In college I drifted away from it. I stopped playing and didn’t share anything for almost six years. After graduating, I ended up in finance in New York—long hours, spreadsheets, constant motion. Late at night when I had come home, I’d quietly tinker with Ableton, trying to teach myself how to work with MIDI. The learning curve felt steep. The gap between what I wanted to make and what I actually knew how to make was huge and overwhelming.
Eventually, something had to give. On a whim, I applied to Berklee College of Music’s film scoring program in Valencia, Spain. When I got in, I quit my job, packed up, and flew to Spain. It was terrifying and freeing. I’m grateful I had the chance to take that leap—and give myself the space to try.
If I could share one thing with anyone thinking about pivoting, it’s this: it’s never too late, and there are always ways to reconnect with what you care about. At Berklee, I met a 55-year-old who had spent his whole career in construction and was just starting his journey into film scoring.
My time in Valencia was short, but it reconnected me with the part of myself that thrives on learning, moving between cultures, and following creative sparks. It was a lot of firsts: I struggled through orchestrations, built digital mockups, picked up the violin again after six years, and found a community of artists to grow with. For the first time, I experienced what it’s like to share music, exchange feedback, and lean into the discomfort that comes with making something on the spot. In many ways, it felt like coming full circle.
Since then, I moved to the Bay Area and eventually to Los Angeles. It started with a local producer meetup called “Beer and Beats”—where I met some of my closest friends (there was always too much of both)—and sharing music online just to see what might resonate. Over time, that turned into scoring films, collaborating with dancers and filmmaker friends, and exploring work that blurs mediums. Along the way, I’ve crossed paths with artists I probably never would have met otherwise. I don’t always know exactly where it’s all going, but I trust that each experience plants a seed for what comes next.
Contact Info:
Website: https://www.angelahsiehmusic.com
Instagram: angelahsiehmusic
Youtube: @angelahsiehmusic
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/angelahsiehmusic
Interviews Janna Morishima 07/27/2025 Reading Time: 20 minutes
How I Made My Debut Graphic Novel: Interview with Angela Hsieh
Angela Hsieh is a Taiwanese American illustrator and author whose life choices can mostly be explained by her love of goofy animals. She is the writer and illustrator of the graphic novel, Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology, as well as the illustrator of the critically acclaimed nonfiction STEM book, Antarctica: The Melting Continent.
In this interview, I met with Angela to learn more about how her debut graphic novel came to life! We discuss the entirety of her graphic novel journey and the lessons she’s learned along the way. (Who would have thought a line-less illustration style would be so complicated!)
Huge thanks to Bailey Culver for editing the interview transcript!
Janna: So, Angela, could you introduce yourself?
Angela: Hello, I’m Angela Hsieh! I am the author and illustrator of Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozology.
Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoolology is about a girl, Lu, who is setting off on an adventure across a land full of giant animals like mountainous guinea pigs and colossal axolotls. And she’s doing this in search of her missing grandmother. She and her friend Ren team up to follow her lost grandmother’s journal to try and find out where she’s disappeared to.
Awesome! So, I wondered if there were elements of your own story, like your personal background, that are woven into the story at all? Can you tell me about where the idea for the book came from?
So, the answer to your question is yes. The idea came from a lot of different places. So, one of the first places where it came from is about, oh gosh, it was probably eight years ago at this point. I drew a birthday illustration for a friend. She really likes guinea pigs. So, I drew her a guinea pig, but really big. So, I drew this giant, mountainous guinea pig that had a little figure climbing up its back. And that little figure was “Proto-Lu” essentially, but at that point, she didn’t have a name. And so that was one part of the inspiration.
At the same time, my family was going through some of my maternal grandfather’s journals and old things because he had passed away a couple of years before that and they were talking about how he was writing this or that in his journal about [me] or about his own life and there was just a point where I realized, wow… I can’t read any of this.
I have like a first-grader understanding of written Chinese. I can speak it all right. I just felt really sad that I would not be able to go through these things myself and it would always be filtered through a family member. Which is fine and it works, but I just felt disconnected. Especially now that he’s no longer around, I wouldn’t be able to talk to him directly. This would kind of be the only way to hear his thoughts again.
And so those two things happened at more or less the same time. Generally, the way my ideas come about is that I just let them sit back for years and sometimes they come together, like the giant guinea pig. There’s also a love of travel and nature that’s been in my life the whole time. And it melded together because I realized that using physical distance as a metaphor for emotional and cultural distance is something that could be very powerful.
So it took a while, but eventually these things sort of connected in my head and I’m like, “Oh, I could make this all work together!” I could put my thoughts and feelings together along with my passions and turn it into a cohesive whole.
So tell me in a little more detail how that process happened. Were you working on other projects at the same time and this was just one of many stories? Or was this one that you really knew you wanted to create?
I can’t really pinpoint an exact moment where I decided that this would happen. It’s kind of like “shower thoughts,” right? You aren’t really expecting it and then one day you’re like, “Whoa, that would be cool if I did that.”
When I graduated from art school, I thought I would be an editorial illustrator. So I was doing that. I had a gig at NPR, an internship that turned into a contract position as an illustrator, and that was great. It was exercising a different part of my brain. A lot of short turnarounds, a lot of nonfiction, and of course, a lot more news.
Maybe it was just a case of my brain trying to find something else to do that was not the thing I was doing every single day. So I wish I could tell you how exactly this came about, because maybe then I could make it happen again on command.
I want to really hone in on this “idea generation to book pitch process.” So, you don’t remember exactly how the ideas came together, but they did start coalescing. And was your first step like, “okay, now I have this story in my head and I want to put together a book proposal and then find an agent,” or did you make a zine with the story? What was the thing that you started working on?
The thing that I actually started working on, after that initial giant mountain guinea pig illustration, was a series of illustrations of other giant animals. My initial thought was to make it a calendar: every month you have another giant animal. (And honestly, I still want to do that. I just got a little derailed. Not in a bad way.)
At the same time, I met a fellow NPR [art] intern, Deb Lee, and we obviously started talking illustration. They very kindly introduced me to their agent and when that happened, I was like, “Oh, I should write something. I should actually make this a story!”
That was when I started considering making it a book. Some of the initial ideas were more of a picture book. But then I realized I just had so much to say and it would not fit. That then turned into a graphic novel pitch. So it took some time. This was quite a long process at the beginning…Oh, also in the middle…and the end. It’s a graphic novel.
I had this idea in the back of my head from when I was very little that I would do a book one day, but I didn’t know if I was ready yet at that point. But then someone came along and gave me a boot in the butt and I was like, “All right, sure. Let’s do it.”
Yay for boots in the butt! And now are you still doing editorial illustration?
Yeah, I still take on the odd job. I’ve had to turn a lot down to finish my book, but I still like to do it because short turnarounds are nice. You feel accomplished without having to wait three years.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Well, speaking of three years, let’s get into the nitty-gritty about how you produced your graphic novel because your artwork is really interesting. I have seen other comics artists who follow the kind of style where there isn’t any inking, but it’s still not common. How did you develop the story and art from start to finish?
I think that goes back to what I was saying about how it started off as a series of illustrations, then turned into a picture book, and then turned into a graphic novel pitch. But as you know, and as I’m sure most kidlit and comics creators know, you don’t have to have a finished script before you go on submission to editors and agents. I had a synopsis that I had written for the pitch that was very, very different from what ended up on the page.
During the querying process, I got a few rejections and a lot of them had the same feedback: “It’s too quiet.”
It was more of a meditation on nature is how I would describe it when it was at that stage, where there were very few words. It was mostly about a very small person in a big expansive landscape. There was that element of not being able to understand the written language of your grandparents, but it was definitely a lot more vague. You go out into nature, you’re not really looking for an answer, but then you come across it. It was a lot artsier, let’s say. That was the initial synopsis.
I was introduced to an agent through my friend. But I ended up finding a different agent and it was simply a style fit. I needed someone who was “meaner.” I need someone to tell me that I need to get things done and not be too nice about it because otherwise I won’t get the thing done. Not to say that my current agent is “mean”, she just is on my case a little more… a lot more. So, I went through the query process with this new synopsis and my current agent, Jen, acquired it based on that synopsis, but had a lot of feedback to make it more exciting and more of an adventure story.
I wrote a new synopsis that had a little more plot and we went on submission with that. And then we got even more feedback about how it needed even more plot.
Once my editor Karen acquired it, she was like, “so maybe we need a little more human interaction in this.” One of the big changes was that Ren became a much bigger part of the story. That was one of those choices that I think made the story a lot stronger because you could see her as a foil to Lu and her story. It’s hard to think about this story without her at this point, but that’s how it started. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until later with some nudges.
Is there any element of your personal life, or say your family background, that is more like Lu or more like Ren or a mixture between them?
Oh, it’s more like Lu’s for sure. My parents are honestly remarkably chill. They are very supportive of my interests and my passions. When I initially went to school as a biology major, I was in pre-med. I wanted to be either a doctor or a veterinarian. At some point, I was just like, “No, I don’t want to do this anymore.” And they were very, very supportive of it.
There’s a scene where Lu is leaving on an adventure and she’s really nervous about telling her parents. Her mom just kind of thinks about it and goes, “All right, be safe.” And I just thought that was just a fun way to poke fun at that one trope of the parents being like, “No, you’re not allowed to do anything.”
Lu was very shocked that her mom’s just like, “Yeah, all right. Just don’t get in trouble.”
Did you ever have any friends growing up like Ren who had parents who were really hard on them?
Yeah. So, that was based on quite a few people that I knew. Maybe not in such obvious ways. I only had so much space in the book. Some of the pieces of Ren’s backstory are a little more on the nose. I do think some people experience things like that in real life. But yeah, there were a lot of my friends who experienced a lot of pressure from their parents, and it felt unfair.
You handled it beautifully. You said you went through several rounds to develop your synopsis. Did you go straight to the script or or was there any thumbnailing involved?
I am one of those people who has to get the script down first. I know there are people who can go straight to thumbnails or they do both at the same time. I’m not one of those people. I draw too slowly to not be sure. I am very keen on wanting the storybeats to be all in the right place.
Things get moved around, of course. But still I had it all written and sent off to edit before I even started thinking about thumbnails. If something really stood out to me, I would probably do a little doodle on the side, but the majority was written first before it turned into thumbnails.
I can’t really see myself working another way at this point in time, but there were a couple of disadvantages to doing it that way because of the page limit. I had 256 pages total. So that ended up being about 240 pages of story and then there was the front and back matter.
But because I wrote the script first, I way overshot that limit in that first round of thumbnails. I think I went to about 320 and then there was some back and forth with my editor. I was asking, “can I have more pages?” And she just went, “no, we just got to get this down.”
So we had to cut some things. A lot of it was just shifting panels around to be more efficient. I think a lot of people run into this issue where you draw a scene moment by moment when it really doesn’t need to be drawn that way; where it’s just like you get everybody’s reactions or you have someone picking up something and you draw like two panels of them picking the thing up when it would just be fine to draw one. Getting rid of some of those, it all eventually ended up in 240 pages without feeling too crowded.
How long did it take you to get from 320 pages of thumbs down to 256? Was it like a month of work or several months of work?
It was less than a month. So I really buckled down with thumbnails. When I got the go, I was just like, “Yeah, let’s do this!” The thumbnails took about a month. And I think there were just a few edits afterwards, but we got that part done fast. The other parts were very slow. I actually have my thumbnails here with me because I love looking at them like this. It looks like I work so hard. Which I did.
I like getting away from a screen as much as possible, which is not very easy. So, this is kind of the only stage where I can do that in my process.
Oh, yeah. It’s really fun when they’re all laid out! So, do you want to show how you turned those thumbnails into pencils and then into final art?
Yes, I’ll do that! So, like I mentioned, I start with a script and I don’t think there’s much I have to say about this particular page. It’s pretty straightforward.
So you get from the script to the final page. How does that happen?
Yeah. So after the synopsis, I used the “save the cat method,” which I have thoughts about, but it’s a very useful starting point. For those who aren’t aware, Save the Cat is a screenwriting method and it’s very prescriptive. Every single scene something must happen, and the acts are divided in a very clear way. It’s very helpful if you don’t know where to start, but I think the book itself can be too specific. However, if you’re stuck, get that book out.
And so this is the page I’m going to be focusing on. And as you can see, it used to be one and a half pages and then we had to mash it into one page. You can see my sticky notes all over everything and how the page number kept shifting around. But with these thumbnails, you can tell that everybody’s just a stick figure. And the way that I differentiated between the Lu and Ren stick figures was that Ren has a little triangle. That’s her ponytail.
With pencils, I use a program called Comic Draw. I believe Victoria Ying has done a couple of videos about Comic Draw, and she does a great job of explaining its features.
It’s iPad only. It’s a little buggy, but the thing that I love about it is that you can put your script in the program and it will autogenerate speech bubbles for you! It’s a little finicky, but to me it’s absolutely worth it. I don’t think I found another program that does that specifically. I don’t use these speech bubbles as the final. They’re mostly for placement because once you export the page, the text is no longer live. It’s just an image. So you can’t really can’t really work with that.
However, like I said, as a layout tool it’s amazing. As you can tell, [in my pencils] everyone’s really scribbly because I don’t do lines. So, I skip the inking stage and I start blocking in colors.
The first thing I always do is put in the panels and then I redraw the speech bubbles because my speech bubbles also don’t have lines. I’m going to find a better way to do this. I don’t recommend this. Do as I say, not as I do.
The color palette is already laid out. I made a character lineup to figure out everyone’s palettes and relative heights. (What I also should have done is a turnaround for my two main characters, but I didn’t do that. So, I could have made life easier, but I didn’t.)
So, I start off by blocking off the silhouettes of my characters and main objects in the scene. It’s pretty straightforward. I just use black so I don’t have to worry about the details. And I keep them all on a separate layer.
And then I block in the colors. I have a general idea of the colors for the scene. This is a dusk scene. But as far as the colors on the characters themselves, I just use the colors that I developed in the palette and the lineup. And I worry about the way the colors interact with the environment later. Right now, it’s just getting all the colors down. I do put some of the background colors in, but we’re just trying to get them to look like Lu and Ren right now.
And this is just adding more detail to the environments. At some point you can tell that I had moved the speech bubbles in that last panel. It was not quite working with the flow. So, I just changed it to be more readable and added more stuff to the background. Adding more detail, really getting the time of day down here. You can also see that I am adding some of the lighting effects from the campfire with the light on Lu and Ren’s sleeves as they’re drinking the soup. This is where I start having the characters fit in with the environment more.
I am a big fan of layer modes. They are so helpful. That means that I can save a lot of time just by putting layer modes over things instead of trying to figure out how someone looks and what color someone would be in each particular scene.
So in this case as you can see that I have used multiple layer modes because glowing things are a pain to do unless you have modes. Frankly it is a lot of playing around and figuring things out. You know generally the fire is warm, the environment is cool and you go from there. You push the sliders around until it works. But once you find what works, make sure you have a palette for that scene.
This is not the final. This is just where I am right now because after this, we had to proof. So, I had to finish most of the colors before we got to proofing. But I’m very, very glad for this stage because I’m not super used to working in print. This was a big learning experience. I made everything too dark. So, as you can see in this set of proofs, this is a different scene, but every nighttime scene I did had the same problem, which is that it looked great on the screen and just completely unreadable on the page. So what I had to do was ask my designer to basically do a global levels change.
Wow, that’s fascinating. I don’t think I’ve heard of somebody who does things exactly like you do.
Oh gosh, there’s a reason why people don’t do this. And I learned. But before we get to that, this is the final page.
I had mentioned earlier that for the text, my designer ran out the text in InDesign once I was giving her the finalized pages. I say “finalized,” but you know I mean multiple adjustments afterwards.
So, as far as this style goes, it’s really hard to work in this style. It took a very, very long time and I’m trying to figure out whether or not I’m going to stay with this in my future books because I love the way it looks. I do not love how long it took and how basically impossible it was to make any sort of pipeline. If I needed assistance for anything, I couldn’t really figure out how to ask people to help with coloring and so on and so forth. The only thing that I could ask people to help me with was speech bubbles, like filling in the speech bubbles. So I don’t really have the answer to that. I just think that it is an extremely time-intensive process that was very difficult to outsource.
So, of all the stages, the coloring took me the longest. Yeah… that took me 15 months.
15 months?!
Yeah. Because I don’t have an ink stage and it just was subsumed. So, from pencils to colors, yeah, it was 15 months. And I’m like, “that’s not sustainable.”
I got much faster by the end, but I think there is a solution that I haven’t found yet. In terms of making my life easier.
Wow. So, I have two questions. So, number one, what was it that made you pick that style in the first place? And then secondly, can you go into a little more detail on why the style you used specifically is more time-intensive than a more typical comics style?
So, I sort of work in this style to begin with. If you look at my editorial illustration, this isn’t too far a step away from that. It’s just that when you have to do multiple panels and multiple pages, that time really adds up. And I like it because I have some aversion to line. I don’t know why.
I did a lot of line when I was first starting out in general. I really love very delicate line work and I always wanted to do that. But I was taking classes at MICA when I was trying to avoid doing my biology classes and the teacher there made us do an assignment where we had to do a portrait of a celebrity in three different styles. One was a line style, one was a painted style, and one was in color blocks. And something about that particular assignment and the way that I could just push the forms around without having to redraw a line just worked for me. From then on, I kept doing it and I ended up here.
As far as how different it would be from a more, is “traditional” the right word? Let’s just say a “line style.” I guess I couldn’t really say, because I haven’t done a long-form project in a line style, but I think the ability to outsource flatting and coloring is something that I was really envious of. It definitely would have shortened the timeline because when you’re done with the lines, you can just start handing off whatever you’re done with to your flatter or your colorist.
But again, I don’t really have much experience in that because I haven’t tried it yet.
Yeah. Now I’m so curious how you’re going to figure this out with your next project.
Yeah. I don’t know. I do remember having a moment of being like, “Oh, my style isn’t suited for comics” and then picking up Katie O’Neill’s Tea Dragon books and being like, “Wait, it is! Oh, yeah. I can do this. Yeah, totally.”
But then you might have noticed that K O’Neill has stepped away from that style. I think I could guess why.
So, one of my questions for you was what part of this process was the most challenging? Would you say coloring in general or something else?
I think just getting it done. Sitting there looking at the 240 pages that I penciled, going, now I have to make these look good.
But right now, I’m currently in the midst of marketing. Which one’s harder? I’m not sure.
What are you doing for marketing right now?
So, I reached out to a lot of bookstores, a lot of groups that I’m in like reaching out to you and KCU. And I am putting off reaching out to my friends who aren’t in the arts. I know I should do it. I’m just putting it off right now because frankly, it’s really, really exhausting.
I think a lot of comic artists and authors can say that they did not go into this because they love marketing. In fact, maybe marketing is the antithesis of who they are, like me. So, uh, it’s tough.
I’m also posting on social media, but that, how do I say, doesn’t feel very helpful. But it also sort of feels like I have to — I suppose we must examine that as an industry. Everyone feels obligated to, but I’m not sure it’s really doing anything.
When you say reaching out to bookstores and groups, are you reaching out just to say, “Hey, I’m an author, here’s my book, and I could do a reading?” What specifically are you doing with outreach to bookstores?
So, a bit of that. I contacted a few about events and signings and I contacted a few others about simply, “Hey, I’m an author, my book’s coming out, would you consider having it on your shelves and if I happen to be in the area, would you like me to come in and sign whatever copies you have?”
That’s generally been pretty successful.
Oh, that’s great!
Yeah. I got ghosted quite a lot, but I’m used to that. You can’t really expect everyone to respond, right?
But yeah, I’ve done that and I also have done the thing that I know some people don’t recommend, which is Googling myself and my book. And one of the things that I thought would be kind of fun, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I did notice there was at least one bookstore that chose my book among others to be part of a graphic novel book club and I was going to reach out to them and ask them, “hey, would you like an author visit during your book club?”
So things like that. I have an opportunity, I just give someone a nudge and it feels weird, but I try to do it.
It is hard work. I know. But kudos to you for doing it.
Thank you. I also did want to mention I have some very, very wonderful friends who are doing a book trailer for me.
Oh, exciting!
Angela: Yeah, it’s going to be animated!
My roommate Mithra Krishnan is a very talented motion designer and she’s worked on some amazing things. I had a friend who storyboarded this as well, MJ Esquivel, you should hire her if you need a storyboarder. They both came together and did this for me and I’m like, “Oh my god, I think I owe you my first born.”
That is adorable. Look at that nose twitch!
I know! So, they’re going to stitch it together and I think it’ll be 30 seconds. I’m doing the backgrounds. (It is my book after all.)
So, yeah, we have a shot list and a shot tracker. We’re trying to find a sound designer. It’s a production! And I have some very amazing friends.
So, what are you planning for your launch party?
I teamed up with a local comic shop, Fantom Comics. You should shop there if you’re in the area, also if you’re not in the area, because they ship!
Oh, okay. Tell people what is the area?
Oh, right haha! I’m in Washington DC.
I’ve heard all about Fantom Comics and I’ve never been there. I really need to go.
They’re amazing! They’re just so friendly and they’re always doing community events. They do Mario Kart night, they do fundraisers, they do book clubs and readings and launches. So, yeah, I’m very excited.
Editors note: Angela had her launch party on July 13th! Here’s a photo!
All right, so let’s see, what did we not talk about yet? Oh, actually, this is kind of going to be going backwards a little bit, but we talked about how you got your agent, and about how you worked with your editor at Harper Collins to develop the story. But once you had your agent and you had the final book proposal and you went out on submission, how long was that process?
It was fast. Oh, it was fast. So, from the day we went on submission to the unofficial acquisition was about three months.
Oh, that is really fast.
Yeah. It’s not very typical. And my agent set up an auction.
When we had interest from one editor, she went around to all of the other people she had submitted to and asked if they were interested and the book went through two rounds of an auction. Yeah. I think it was between four or five houses. It was pretty exciting. It made me feel like the special girl at prom. Everyone wants me to go to prom with them.
Oh my gosh, that is exciting. Congratulations on that! That definitely doesn’t happen all the time. So, that’s awesome!
Yeah. And it’s actually a two book deal, so I still got to work on that next one.
Ah, okay. So, that sort of brings us back full circle to where we started when you and I were chatting in the very beginning. So, is your next project completely wide open still or do you know what it’s going to be about?
I think I know, but like I had mentioned, I’m so busy trying to get the word out about Geozoology that I’m really frustrated that I don’t get to work on it. So, I don’t have anything concrete to tell anybody. It’s in the works, though!
It’s not going to be a sequel because I do think I need a break from this world. As much as I love it, it’s already a miracle that I stuck with this thing for four or five years. I really like short-term projects. So, again, miracle that this ever got done, but it will still be fantasy and it will still be middle grade and it will be in color.
Well, that’s actually great. That gives me a good sense of what your target is.
Yeah. Well, we’ll see. I really want to get going on this.
Well, we can wrap it up now. So, can you tell me how you want people to connect with you if they want to follow you, buy your book, or support you?
You can find me always at my website, which is angelahh.com. I have a newsletter on Substack. It is angelahsieh.substack.com. I am on social media everywhere, and my handle is spelled @hisiheyah. It’s hard to spell, but I’m very fond of it because it is essentially a messed up version of my last name that I thought was so hilarious.
My brother, when he was on a volleyball team in high school, everybody just called him that and I’m like, “I’m stealing that.” So, that’s where you can find me.
And my book Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology is available wherever you buy your books.
Well, thanks for joining me, Angela! I can’t wait for the book to come out and all good things.
Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun!
Hsieh, Angela LU AND REN'S GUIDE TO GEOZOOLOGY Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins (Children's None) $15.99 5, 27 ISBN: 9780063207905
Two friends follow an old journal to find one girl's missing grandmother.
Lu loves hearing her geozoologist grandmother Ah-ma's stories about her adventures and work with creatures like the mossbear and stonefowl. Lu wants to accompany her on her next expedition, but Ah-ma says she's too young. As time passes and Ah-ma's letters stop coming, Lu becomes determined to find her. She's sure she can discover clues to Ah-ma's whereabouts in her old travel journal. But the journal is written in Cylian, and Lu can't read the characters fluently. One day, her childhood friend Ren appears in the neighborhood, and the two decide to travel together to find Ah-ma. Along the way, they meet some of Ah-ma's friends and encounter the wonders Ah-ma taught Lu about. But trouble looms as Ren keeps big secrets, and Lu struggles with revelations about her grandmother's past. This full-color graphic novel is a beautiful story of family and friendship set in a fantasy world that cleverly combines geology and zoology. The two girls grapple with familial issues connected to expectations, language barriers, and loss. Lu, Ren, and their families speak Lirrish and Cylian, corollaries of English and Mandarin Chinese, respectively; differently colored fonts indicate which language they're using. Lu has dark brown skin and black hair, and Ren has lighter brown skin and black hair.
A charming story of relationships and fantastical discoveries. (map, language note, The Traveler's Guide to Geozoology, making of the graphic novel)(Graphic fantasy. 8-12)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Hsieh, Angela: LU AND REN'S GUIDE TO GEOZOOLOGY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A832991759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4fb26ab9. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
HSIEH, Angela. Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology. illus. by Angela Hsieh. 256p. HarperCollins/Quill Tree. May 2025. Tr $24.99. ISBN 9780063207899.
Or 3-7-Lu's grandmother Shan is a great geozoologist who travels around the country, studying megafauna and helping people. Whenever she visits Lu and her mother, she tells stories of her life's work; Lu wants to be just like her and join her on her next adventure. Meanwhile, Ren is from a family of high expectations. Her brother is perfect, and she is expected to be just like him; when she isn't, she is labeled as a disappointment. She runs away and meets up with Lu just as a letter arrives asking for help from Shan. She hasn't been heard from in many months, so Lu and Ren set out to find her, and maybe help the folks from the letter at the same time. Their own adventure turns out to be a bit different than either of them expected. Hsieh's lineless, colorful illustration brings a sense of whimsy to this tale. It feels both familiar, with its strong ties to Chinese culture and language, and at the same time, magical and faraway, like a fairy-tale world. Lu and Ren both struggle with their sense of self, but those tough emotions are softened by the moments of sheer joy in between. The pacing is steady, but readers will find themselves wanting to stay put for a while to enjoy the scenery alongside the heroines. VERDICT A sweet and fun romp through a magical countryside, steadied by a strong message of finding what truly makes one happy.--Lauren Sullivan
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Sullivan, Lauren. "HSIEH, Angela. Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology." School Library Journal, vol. 71, no. 4, Apr. 2025, pp. 123+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836879626/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9455531c. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.
* Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology. By Angela Hsieh. Art by the author. May 2025. 256p. HarperCollins/Quill Tree, paper, $15.99 (9780063207905). Gr. 3-6. 741.5.
Migrating guinea pig mountains, island-size axolotls, and floating bands of cloudlike jellyfish are just a few of the delightfully imaginative geozoological phenomena in Hsieh's clever debut graphic novel. Lu's ah-ma, a notorious explorer and geozoologist, has been in the field for years--long enough that Lu is starting to worry. When Lu learns about some sick ambystufas (stone salamanders) a few towns over, she grabs her grandmothers journal and maps, recruits her friend Ren to join her, and decides to see if she can solve the problem herself. As Lu and Ren try to figure out what's making the ambystufas sick, they learn more about Ah-ma than what they could gather from her journals and follow clues through the countryside to find the source of a wideranging ecological crisis. Hsieh's soft, lineless art style is an ideal vehicle for the inventive creatures that blend smoothly into the rolling landscapes. As Lu and Ren travel the countryside and butt heads over their priorities, they gradually learn to appreciate each other's needs and expectations. Throughout it all is a realistic lesson about how one careless action can lead to cascading environmental disaster. A closing field guide with more information about geozoological phenomena will thrill animal lovers. This smart, grounded, and gentle fantasy is a quiet standout.--Sarah Hunter
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Hunter, Sarah. "Lu and Ren's Guide to Geozoology." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 17-18, May 2025, pp. 70+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A852211759/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03a54aed. Accessed 2 Nov. 2025.