Guest post written by The Lost Queen author Aimee Phan
Aimee Phan was born and raised in Orange County, California. She received her BA in English from UCLA and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of two books for adults, We Should Never Meet: Stories and the novel The Reeducation of Cherry Truong. She has received fellowships and residencies from the NEA, MacDowell Colony, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, Djerassi and Hedgebrook. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Time, USA Today and CNN.com among other publications. Aimee teaches as an associate professor in writing and literature at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco and resides in Berkeley, California with her family.
About The Lost Queen: A heroine like no other, ancient magic unleashed, a fated epic battle–the first book in an enchanting YA fantasy duology inspired by Vietnamese lore, weaving magic, sisterhood, and self-discovery.
I’ve always wanted a sister.
When I was a kid, I envied my friends with sisters, even though my younger brother was perfectly fine. There were things that sisters shared that weren’t possible with my brother. Like clothes, hair scrunchies, jewelry, and of course, the ability to switch places and fool people into believing I was someone else.
As a kid, I adored reading the Sweet Valley High books, and their younger spinoff the Sweet Valley Twins. I devoured these stories involving Elizabeth and Jessica, the southern California twins with their matching outfits, fooling adults, bickering, jealousies, but most of all sisterly bonding.
I dreamed of having a long lost twin sister, who looked like me, shared the same thoughts and interests. We’d be each other’s best friends and communicate in our own secret language or use telepathy. I would wonder out loud to my dad if he was sure I wasn’t a twin. Maybe another baby had been born without their knowing? If anyone understood the importance of sisters, my father did, because he had nine sisters.
Yet I had no girl cousins around my age on my father’s side, which made me feel lonely on our family vacations and gatherings, when my brother had cousins to wrestle and play with, and I only had my books. My father reminded me how special I was as the only girl in our extended family, but it still felt lonely.
My dad told me the story of the Trung Sisters, two sisters who united an army of mostly women, to rebel against the Han Empire and found the country of Vietnam. Their short but impactful history fascinated me and became my inspiration to write The Lost Queen, a young adult fantasy duology where two girls in contemporary northern California discover that they are the reincarnated spirits of the Trung Sisters.
It was a chance for me to explore one of Vietnam’s most celebrated legends, while also fulfilling my dream of having a sister. I realized that my longing to have a sister, to explore another life that was close to me, but not quite mine, was very similar to my desire to write and explore other people’s lives. I could be brave, reckless, make mistakes, and face challenges that I’d only imagined in my head, but on these pages, my heroines could embody these struggles, persevere against their enemies, and triumph.
I started writing this book to explore sisterhood, friendship, and the struggles young girls face to find their inner warriors. It didn’t take me long to realize sisterhood is much more complex than the fun fantasy I initially imagined. That there could also be jealousy, insecurity, disagreements and betrayal. I loved pursuing all of those themes in this duology, and surprising myself with the twists and turns a seemingly simple myth of two powerful sisters can take.
