Aru Shah and the End of Time meets Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away in this mesmerizing portal fantasy that takes readers into the little-known world of Jinn.
Nura longs for the simple pleasure of many things—to wear a beautiful red dupatta or to bite into a sweet gulab. But with her mom hard at work in a run-down sweatshop and three younger siblings to feed, Nura must spend her days earning money by mica mining. But it’s not just the extra rupees in her pocket Nura is after. Local rumor says there’s buried treasure in the mine, and Nura knows that finding it could change the course of her family’s life forever.
Her plan backfires when the mines collapse and four kids, including her best friend, Faisal, are claimed dead. Nura refuses to believe it and shovels her way through the dirt hoping to find him. Instead, she finds herself at the entrance to a strange world of purple skies and pink seas—a portal to the opulent realm of jinn, inhabited by the trickster creatures from her mother’s cautionary tales. Yet they aren’t nearly as treacherous as her mother made them out to be, because Nura is invited to a luxury jinn hotel, where she’s given everything she could ever imagine and more.
But there’s a dark truth lurking beneath all that glitter and gold, and when Nura crosses the owner’s son and is banished to the working quarters, she realizes she isn’t the only human who’s ended up in the hotel’s clutches. Faisal and the other missing children are there, too, and if Nura can’t find a way to help them all escape, they’ll be bound to work for the hotel forever.
Set in a rural industrial town in Pakistan and full of hope, heart, and humor, Nura and the Immortal Palace is inspired by M.T. Khan’s own Pakistani Muslim heritage.
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Gr 4–6—In a poor village in Pakistan, 12-year-old Nura digs for mica in the mines, helping support her widowed mother and three younger siblings, sometimes using her pay to buy herself her favorite sweet treat, gulab jamun. Mining is dangerous; it's how her father died, and Nura's mother wants her to stop. Nura promises she will after one more day, but that is the day the mine collapses and her best friend Faisal, along with several other children, gets trapped inside. When Nura risks her own safety to venture back into the collapsed mine to find them, she is lured into a magical jinn palace full of sparkle and riches beyond her wildest dreams, only to be tricked by the jinn back into the very same sort of child labor scheme she just left. Will Nura outsmart the jinn, find a way to escape the immortal palace, and save the trapped children? With expert pacing, Khan dishes out tidbits of Pakistani culture while readers remain absorbed in the high-action fantasy world, perhaps not realizing they are learning about the holiday Eid, a story from the Quran, or how gulab jamun tastes. While the wrongs of exploiting children evolves naturally as an integral theme of the story, the author tries a two-for-one approach, throwing discussions of education access into the mix alongside the obvious contradiction that it is our underserved heroine who outsmarts everyone at the end. VERDICT A strong purchase for any fantasy collection, but especially those wanting to feature culturally diverse stories.—Hillary Perelyubskiy