• Genre: Fantasy with a touch of Sci Fi, maybe
• Age group: Middle Grade
• Pub. date: January 19th 2021
• Format: Audiobook
• Pages: 416
• Goodreads link

Quinton Peters was the golden boy of the Rosewood low-income housing projects, receiving full scholarship offers to two different Ivy League schools. When he mysteriously goes missing, his little sister, 13-year-old Amari Peters, can’t understand why it’s not a bigger deal. Why isn’t his story all over the news? And why do the police automatically assume he was into something illegal?

Then Amari discovers a ticking briefcase in her brother’s old closet. A briefcase meant for her eyes only. There was far more to Quinton, it seems, than she ever knew. He’s left her a nomination for a summer tryout at the secretive Bureau of Supernatural Affairs. Amari is certain the answer to finding out what happened to him lies somewhere inside, if only she can get her head around the idea of mermaids, dwarves, yetis and magicians all being real things, something she has to instantly confront when she is given a weredragon as a roommate.

Amari must compete against some of the nation’s wealthiest kids—who’ve known about the supernatural world their whole lives and are able to easily answer questions like which two Great Beasts reside in the Atlantic Ocean and how old is Merlin? Just getting around the Bureau is a lesson alone for Amari with signs like ‘Department of Hidden Places this way, or is it?’ If that all wasn’t enough, every Bureau trainee has a talent enhanced to supernatural levels to help them do their jobs – but Amari is given an illegal ability. As if she needed something else to make her stand out.

With an evil magican threatening the whole supernatural world, and her own classmates thinking she is an enemy, Amari has never felt more alone. But if she doesn’t pass the three tryouts, she may never find out what happened to Quinton.

I think Amari and the Night Brothers has everything it needs to become the next hot middle-grade book. It perfectly captures that magical sense of wonder that plucks the reader from the mundane into a magical world, hidden just behind the curtain. I don’t think I’ve reacted so strongly to the wonder in a book in years. It was love at first sight between me and this book and it kept me hooked all the way through.

Amari is having a really tough time, her brother has gone missing and she’s getting bullied at school. The story gets started when she gets invited to a summer school thing at the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs. The Bureau is amazingly cool. Part magic school, part Men in Black headquarters, it’s got it all. Creative and interesting departments, secret histories, aliens, links to Atlantis, plots aplenty. For a bit of familiarity, it also has the same kind of assholes as her regular school. I loved every part where she was learning about the Bureau and the magical world, it’s so wonderous. Magic-wise I think it’s a soft system, everyone has their own talent that they have to figure out how to use, I really like that sort of setting and how it gives opportunity for creativity.

The shape of the story was somewhat familiar, but since I read this for the Bingo Comfort Read square that worked out perfectly. It was fun cause there was one trope that I kept going back and forth the entire book thinking something would either be one way or the other, sort of constantly guessing. I was engaged and always trying to figure out what was what, and I really liked that goodies and the baddies weren’t as clear cut as I’d expect from MG. (She said, having read a handful at most of modern MG books) The good guys treat one category of people really badly, and the bad guys have a good point about that, but they also stay power-hungry baddies, they just have some nuance to them, not pure evil for evil’s sake.

It’s probably weird but my favorite character is the one that’s absent. We learn about Amari’s brother through hers and others’ memories of him and I thought that was very interesting and sort of mysterious. I liked the teachers/agents more than the kids, but I think that’s more to do with me generally liking adults better. Amari was really fun, some of the other kinds were intentionally nasty.

I listened to the audiobook, and I loved it. I actually initially got the book just because of Imani Parks’s narration of Root Magic by Eden Royce. She has a lovely voice and quickly becoming one of my favorite narrators.

r/Fantasy bingo: Comfort Read, Published in 2021 (HM), Author You’ve Never Read Before, Revenge seeking character, Debut Author

If you enjoyed my review of Amari and the Night Brothers by B.B. Alston you might like these other middle-grade fantasy books:

Root Magic by Eden Royce

The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher

The Jumbies by Tracey Baptiste

Riverland by Fran Wilde