Aru Shah and the End of Time

Aru Shah should know better than to light the cursed lamp in her family’s museum, but when the alternative is humiliation in front of her most popular classmates, what else can she do? Of course, nothing good ever comes from cursed lamps, and Aru finds her classmates and family frozen in time. With nothing but an irate pigeon and a previously-unknown soul-sister to help her, Aru journeys through the Court of the Sky, the Night Bazaar and even the Kingdom of Death in order to stop the awakening of the God of Destruction.

The amount of joy I got from this book cannot be expressed by mere words. As much as I loved reading about Percy Jackson and Jason Grace (and I did!), the feeling of reading an adventure story and set in a world that I know from the stories I grew up with means so much more. Aru is such a fun protagonist, the settings and supporting characters that Chokshi has written are beautifully complex, and I have never felt so sad for a magical palace as I did in this book.