Amira & Hamza, The War to Save the Worlds

Samira Ahmed's Amira & Hamza, The War to Save the Worlds is a jinn adventure for 8 year olds about two squabbling siblings and one ancient object they should have left alone.

What happens

Amira is twelve and has just given up on wishing. She has failed her karate test three times now. Science is the thing she trusts, and tonight she gets her reward, a supermoon and a blue moon and a blood moon all at once, from the roof of a Chicago museum.

Hamza, her younger brother, is not remotely interested. He has been dragged away from his Lego build to look at what he calls a bunch of used tools belonging to dead astronomers, and he has brought a foam-dart bowcaster with him.

Then he lifts a small round thing out of a display case. Al-Biruni's Box of the Moon, built around a thousand years ago and broken for most of them.

They fight over it. They drop it. The gears start turning.

What happens next happens fast. The sky goes black. Every adult on the rooftop folds gently to the floor, their mum and dad included. A piece of the moon cracks off and starts coming towards them. And a golden throne lands in the street carrying a hundred jinn who say the two of them are in a prophecy.

Amira tells it all herself, which is where the fun is. She is practical and cross and keeps hunting for the logical explanation (indigestion, she decides, quite seriously). Hamza meanwhile is giggling at the name of the jinn emperor and asking a jinn why he does not just magic his eyesight better. The bickering does not stop because the world is ending, and honestly that is what makes it work.

There is plenty here that is lovely, too. Their mum's warning about squabbling siblings and eclipses. Nani's stories about things moving on their own on a veranda in Hyderabad. Their dad telling Amira she is loved and she is enough, right after she says out loud what people would assume about a building with Arabic on the front.

One thing to flag. The children watch their parents drop unconscious in front of them, and then a jinn tells them plainly that they might not be going home to their parents at all. It is early, it is upsetting, and both children cry. A child who worries about losing a parent may want you close by for that chapter. A child who likes proper stakes in an adventure will be gripped by exactly the same pages.

What to read next

For another modern child pulled sideways into the stories their family grew up on, try Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky. Tristan's best friend has died before that book even starts, and it is his friend's journal that opens the door.