Nura and the Immortal Palace

M. T. Khan's Nura and the Immortal Palace is a fantasy for 9 year olds that starts deep underground, in a mine only children are small enough to dig.

What happens

Nura is twelve, and she mines mica. It's the glittery stuff that goes into paint and make-up, and she scrapes it out of narrow tunnels near her town in Pakistan from sunrise to sunset. Her baba did the same job before he died. Her maa sews in a crumbling sweatshop, and there are three younger children at home to feed.

So Nura is hunting for the Demon's Tongue. It's a legendary treasure the kids whisper about, hidden somewhere in the tunnels, and finding it would mean her family never went hungry again.

Faisal, her best friend, isn't so sure. He's gentle and careful, and he keeps begging her not to dig so deep. (He has a stutter too, and Nura is very quick to stamp her feet at anyone who teases him for it.)

Nura doesn't listen. The tunnels cave in, and Faisal is one of the children who doesn't come out.

She won't accept it. That night she goes back with a shovel, and instead of Faisal she finds a pink sea under a violet sky, full of jinn. One of them looks exactly like her.

Nura's a brilliant narrator. She's stubborn, funny and permanently hungry (she wonders if a tiger lives in her stomach). Her longing for sweets from the market sounds like a small thing, but it tells you everything about how little her family has. Her maa's jinn stories, told with all four children piled on her lap, are a real treat too.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Children working in dangerous mines is a real thing, and the book doesn't pretend otherwise. The collapse comes early, and the grown-ups tell the other children that the missing ones are gone. Nura lost her baba years before the story opens, and when she first arrives the jinn throw fireballs at her for fun.

A child who's anxious about losing people might find those opening chapters hard. A reader who's ready for a fantasy with real weight, and a heroine who flatly refuses to give up, will be hooked.

What to read next

If they're after more jinn, try Amira & Hamza, where a brother and sister on a Chicago museum rooftop suddenly find a whole army of jinn with swords standing in front of them.