We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from The Lost Queen, the start of a young adult fantasy duology by Aimee Phan, out from G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers on May 6th.
Jolie Lam, a high school sophomore in San Jose, is known for two things: her bizarre freakout at last year’s swim meet and her fortuneteller grandfather with visions of dragons and earthquakes. Friendless and ostracized, Jolie’s life takes a dramatic turn for the better when she saves the school’s it-girl, Huong Pham, during a haunting vision of her own. Taken under Huong’s wing, Jolie’s world transforms, in more ways than one.
As Jolie and Huong’s bond deepens, they unlock long lost powers: telepathic abilities, fluency in Vietnamese, and eerie premonitions. This leads them to a shocking revelation: they have ties to legendary queens and goddesses of ancient Vietnam. While a thrilling discovery, it also sets them on a perilous journey.
The girls must navigate dreams and portals to piece together their past lives and reclaim their immortal elements before their ancient enemies strike again. But all is not what it seems, and Jolie must determine friend from foe, truth from lie, and ultimately right from wrong in this battle for all she loves and the fate of the world.
THE PSYCHIC
Huong wasn’t my first vision, but she was certainly the first good one. And way better than the last, which had essentially ruined my friendships, torched my reputation, and destroyed my life. Bad visions could do that, especially if you tried to ignore them. You pushed them deep inside your body and, inevitably, they erupted.
Just ask my psychic grandpa.
When people found out I was descended from a long line of psychics, they got excited, like I was related to a tech founder or a movie star. They asked a lot of questions.
Do they know where you are… like right now?
Can they see dead people?
Do they know when you’re going to die?
Can they predict lottery numbers? The SuperLotto is up to 500 million right now!
Can they tell my future? I’d love to know if Fin likes me, if I’ll get into Stanford, what questions Miss Haskins is going to use on our econ quiz, etc., etc., etc.
It was not nearly that fun. Which was why I hadn’t seen my dad in over eight years. Why I sat alone at lunch every day at school. Why my former friends refused to speak to me. Once people got over the holy-shit spectacle of it all, the reality that my grandfather was a thầy bói, a fortune-teller, started to sound creepy. And when you factored in all the stereotypes, the idea of being psychic started to lose its charm.
Some of the biggest lies I’d heard about psychics:
1. They were all the same.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. There were clairvoyants, spiritual diviners, sensitives, astrologers, precognitors, telepaths, feng shui experts, geomancers, lucid projectors, intuitives, and telekinesists among the many, many types of mediums in the world. Some abilities crossed over, but not always.
For readings, they could use tarot cards, rice grains, coins, tea leaves, and, yes, sometimes those sparkly crystal balls. Some had even updated their tools and used phone apps.
My ancestors never needed objects to perform readings. Ông Nội dismissed them as garbage. He wouldn’t even hold your palm to pretend to read it. A good thầy bói knew what was going on when a person walked into the room and didn’t need props.
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2. They were fakes.
If this was what you really thought, then my ancestors’ legacy as revered thầy bói in Vietnam would never sway you. You wouldn’t believe that prominent village leaders and government officials visited our family home seeking advice on strategic planning, or that families from around the region would ask for the best wedding dates for their children or request horoscope charts for newly born grandsons. Granddaughters rarely warranted such trouble, unless they were rich.
You certainly wouldn’t believe that my Ông Nội anticipated the end of the civil war. On the day Saigon fell, he warned our relatives and neighbors to not bother rushing the American embassy, because the handful of American helicopters on the roof were not nearly enough for the thousands already clamoring for refuge. He promised our family would escape. They’d just have to wait five years for the right boat. Ông Nội himself would navigate a grueling three-week odyssey through the South China Sea to eventually reach a refugee camp in Thailand that would grant them sanctuary.
You would not believe how Ông Nội called my dad one morning only weeks after my parents had eloped, when he and my mom were still living in a studio apartment in Venice Beach, and told them that they were pregnant with me. My mother was barely four weeks pregnant. “It’s a girl, and you are moving home so we can help raise her,” Ông Nội said, hanging up before they could protest or ask questions.
3. They were greedy, cheating swindlers. And they should be able to predict lottery numbers. If they said they couldn’t, they were lying.
Okay. First of all, how could psychics predict lotto numbers and also be con artists whose sole intention was to take everyone’s money? Since we live in Silicon Valley, the land of venture capitalists and startups, this greedy attitude is everywhere.
My family had never been rich. We lived in an affluent neighborhood in San Jose only because my grandparents bought their first home before the tech boom. Ông Nội used to take perverse pride in the dilapidated conditions of their house while increasingly being surrounded by snotty neighbors. Let them look down on us, he’d say, they won’t be here for long. Whether he meant another tech bubble would be bursting or something worse, I didn’t know and didn’t want to ask.
4. They could foresee every disaster or tragedy, both small and large, including when you were going to die.
Come on. Psychics couldn’t predict everything in the future and recall everything in the past. The world was too massive, chaotic, and messed up for any human being, medium or not, to possibly try to control. If the psychics in our family could predict everything, they would have avoided the war that resulted in the deaths of millions of civilians and soldiers and forced them out of their home country. They would have prevented my dad from leaving. They would have prevented my mom from dying.
She died in childbirth. Preeclampsia that the doctors hadn’t detected in all those prenatal appointments. I never got a chance to meet her. We had very few photos of her in the house, but Bà Nội said she saw more of my mom in me every day, not only in my face and body, but in the way I crossed my arms when I was overthinking something, or biting my lip when I was mad.
Most of all, they would have foreseen Ông Nội’s dementia—how it would slowly but surely steal everything imaginative, compassionate, and astounding about his powerful brain; how it would frighten away most of his clients. That was what dried up his business. Now, of course, he didn’t say much of anything at all.
So even if psychics could make these epic forecasts and change history to improve their own lives, who would listen to them? Who would believe them?
They were frail, vulnerable, bewildered people just like the rest of us.
Excerpted from The Lost Queen, copyright © 2025 by Aimee Phan.