Nura and the Immortal Palace

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.