Amari and the Night Brothers

B B Alston's Amari and the Night Brothers is a secret-world adventure for 9 year olds, and it starts with a girl in the principal's office who has just shoved somebody.

What happens

Amari shoved her because the girl made a joke about her brother being dead.

Quinton has been missing six months. He was the one who made everything look easy, valedictorian, two Ivy League offers turned down for a job he was never allowed to describe. When Amari and her mum told the detectives about that job, the detectives found no record of it and looked at them like they were making it up.

Amari has not stopped looking. She posts his missing person poster on a dozen websites at a time on a laptop he won at a science fair and handed down to her.

She is at Jefferson Academy on a scholarship, and the girls there call her Charity Case and Free Lunch and tell her that kids like her do not belong. After the shove, the scholarship goes. Her mum, who works twelve-hour hospital shifts five days a week, sits in the car outside their flat and cries.

Then Amari finds something of Quinton's that has been waiting for her, and it turns out her brother's job was with a hidden department that handles magicians, aliens and things most people have never heard of. There is a place at their summer tryouts with her name on it.

Everyone else competing has known about all this since they were born. Amari has known about it for a week.

What makes the book work is that the magic never cancels the real part. She arrives in a wildly strange building still carrying her temper, her grief and the certainty that people have already decided what she is. The unfairness she meets there rhymes with the unfairness she left behind, which is uncomfortable and exactly the point.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The bullying is racist and it is about money, and it is quoted directly rather than hinted at. Amari's brother is missing and the police think he is dead. Her mum breaks down in front of her in chapter one. None of it is gratuitous and the book is firmly on Amari's side, but a child who has not met this kind of thing in a story yet will have questions. It is a good book to read alongside a reader rather than hand over and walk away from.

What to read next

If your reader takes to a girl the world has written off getting one impossible chance, The Trials of Morrigan Crow is in the library as well. Morrigan is blamed for every hailstorm and dead cat in her town, until a stranger takes her somewhere hidden and enters her for tests she is not supposed to be able to pass.