The City Beyond the Stars

Zohra Nabi's The City Beyond the Stars is a magical quest for 11 year olds, full of sorcerers, jinn and one very stubborn girl.

What happens

Yara lives in a hidden settlement of sorcerers in the mountains, surrounded by soldiers. She's supposed to be learning spells in verse from her strict teacher Leyla. Instead she's sulking, failing her invisibility spell and thinking about Ismah Parveen. The Grand High Sorceress is locked in the alchemists' dungeons in the city, and Yara feels it's all her fault she's still there.

Then Yara finds a black cat, starved and badly hurt, just over the boundary. He's no ordinary cat. He's the Grand High Sorceress's jinn familiar, and he's brought a message. One word, really. Home.

So Yara, her friends Rafi and Mehnoor and her own jinn Ajal set off to find the sorceress's secret house among the cedar forests, without telling a single grown-up. Ajal is the best thing in it. He's usually a goat (by choice), he reads Yara's mind whether she likes it or not and he's very dry about having to babysit three children.

It follows on from The Kingdom Over the Sea, so if your reader hasn't met Yara yet, start there. It picks up a few months on and fills you in as it goes.

It's a gorgeous world to be in. A flying tapestry, a ruby that glows from inside, a giant roc that snatches Yara out of the sky and a band of bandits whose Captain is terribly polite about robbing you. The magic is all spoken verse, which is a lovely touch.

What makes it, though, is Yara herself. She's angry and impatient, she says awful things to Leyla and then feels awful about it. She still misses Mama, who raised her in Bournemouth and has since died. It's very easy to be on her side even when she's being impossible!

It opens darker than it goes on. The prologue has the Great Library burning, and a captured sorceress dragged in bloody and bruised. The villain threatens to drown a baby. The injured cat is quite upsetting too. For a confident older reader it's all handled well, but it might be too much for a sensitive one.

What to read next

If your reader's after more jinn and another brave girl, Nura and the Immortal Palace follows a twelve-year-old who digs for mica in the mines and ends up in a glittering world of jinn.