It’s always interesting to see how themes come out of year’s Cybils reading. Ghosts are definitely winning the book count this year, but I’ve read three books with jinn so far, all excellent. Here are two of them.

Farrah Noorzad and the Ring of Fate by Deeba Zargarpur. Labyrinth Road, 2024. ISBN 9780593564417. Read from a library copy.

Middle schooler Farrah has grown up seeing her father only on her birthday, hidden from his family because her parents never married. Still, she practices the rock climbing and parkour he’s taught her all year round. On her 12th birthday, at the peak of their climb, he gives her a box that contains a ring and asks if she would wish on it. Though he’s acting strange, she does – and finds that her wish to be part of his world has sucked him into her ring and made her able to see the jinn world that she thought only existed in his stories. The news that she’s half jinn explains why she’s never broken a bone despite her many climbing falls. Unfortunately, she needs to rescue her father – quite urgently, as she’s being chased by vicious shadow jinn. The only people who can help her are the reluctant jinn boy Idris, who had been trapped in the ring himself, and her newly discovered half-brother Yaseen. Even more unfortunately, Farrah learns that her very existence is illegal, so that she’s now wanted by the whole court of jinn kings. Even her half-brother is considerably less than pleased to learn of her existence. And all the while, she hears the ring talking to her, in a voice that no one else can hear.

This is one to appeal to fans of Rick Riordan. I’ve read a lot of books in that style over the years now, and Farrah Noorzad and the Ring of Fate definitely stood out. Farrah’s sense of humor, her love for her family, loyalty to her friends, and very helpful skills in climbing and parkour were all great. As she’s grown up as an immigrant in the US, outcast by her father’s family, and now finds that’s she mixed jinn and human as well, she has a lot to say about finding a place when you don’t belong in the normal categories.

Amir and the Jinn Princess by M.T. Khan. Jimmy Patterson, 2024. ISBN 978-0759557970. Listened to audiobook on Libby.

What’s in a choice, and who has it? Ever since his mother disappeared a year ago, 12-year-old Amir has felt like he has no choice in his life. As the youngest son of one of the richest business owners in Pakistan, every moment is planned out for him. Blocks for school, tutoring, horse riding, sleep. He has abandoned all his old friends, believing that everyone at school is only being nice in the hopes of future favors from his family, and his efforts to keep his grades up, because he’s destined for a top post at the company firm no matter how poorly he does. Then he makes one seemingly small choice – to feed a stray cat at school, and smuggle her home.

But it turns out that this is no ordinary kitten. She’s a jinn girl who suggests that Amir’s mother might have slipped through into the jinn realm. She offers to help Amir look for his mother there, if he helps her win the competion for heir among her 35 (I think) siblings. Because oh, yes, she’s not just a jinn but a jinn princess, one of the youngest in her very large family, and looked down on by her siblings and parents for not having fire powers. And because Amir’s grandmother has announced that it’s time for his father to remarry, Amir is desperate enough to go with the jinn girl, Shamsa.

Much to his chagrin, he has to pose as Shamsa’s servant in the jinn realm. This means – horror – actually working as a servant. It also means working with another human boy his own age – one who tells Amir how much better it is working as a servant in the jinn realm than working for the horrible brick factory he worked at before finding his way to the jinn realm. As Amir gets to know the other boy, he learns a lot about his own father’s business, things that don’t line up with the how his father always told him that anyone who was poor was so because of their own bad choices earlier in life. And as he helps Shamsa, he has to decide if he’s helping Shamsa only because of their bargain, or if he really believes that Shamsa has something more to offer the jinn world than her siblings do.

As with M.T. Khan’s first book, Nura and the Immortal Palace, Khan weaves a compelling and fast-paced fantasy story together with a hard look at social injustice, inherited privilege, and the power our choices can have.

For more with djinn/jinn, see Adventures with Djinn: Nayra and the Djinn and Kingdom over the Sea, and note that the sequele to Kingdom over the Sea, City Beyond the Stars is now available and just as good if not better.