By B. B. Alston
A girl from the projects gets recruited into a secret bureau of the supernatural to find her missing brother, and discovers she has the one kind of magic everyone is taught to fear.
Amari Peters's big brother Quinton has been missing for months, and everyone but Amari has given up on him. Then a ticking briefcase he left behind cracks open with a message: an invitation to try out for the Bureau of Supernatural Affairs, a hidden world of magicians, weredragons, and elevators that drop into the center of the earth. Amari takes it, partly to belong somewhere and mostly to find out what happened to Quinton. But when she's tested, she lights up as a magician, the one kind of supernatural everyone has been taught to fear and outlaw, and suddenly she's the girl half the Bureau wants gone. She has to make it through tryouts, hide what she is, and follow her brother's trail toward the thing that took him. It moves like a rocket, it's funny, and underneath the adventure is a real girl missing someone she loves.
This is the book you hand the eleven-year-old who tore through Percy Jackson and Harry Potter and wants that feeling again, with a hero who looks like more of them. Amari is a poor Black girl on scholarship, doubted at her fancy school and doubted again in the magical world, and she is brave and funny and easy to root for from the first page. The magic is inventive, the pace never lets up, and there are two more books waiting when this one ends, so a child who loves it is set for a good long while. Under the fun it's about being judged for what you are before anyone bothers to know who you are, which lands for a child this age without ever feeling like a lesson.