Adventure In The City Of Stories by Emma Otheguy

with wonderful illustrations by Poly Bernatene.

This sequel to Cousins In The Time Of Magic finds our three young protagonists Siggy, Camilla and Jorge heading back in time for an even more personal reason than in the first book. Camilla is already having a terrible day after being humiliated at her Florida school by the principal, for the crime of bringing in books in Spanish for her new friend Marisol. The books were sent home for being “about race”, which is essentially code for not centering mainstream white American culture.

To cheer her up, Jorge pulls out a book and some puppets he’d found while looking for the good snacks at their Tia Xia’s house. They decide to bring them over to Marisol’s but are waylaid by neighborhood bully Cooper Tumbor. The cousins flee into Tia Xia’s tinajon to hide from him but wind up having to set sail with a pursuing Siggy across the seas of time to 1930s New York City.

Turns out that the book and puppets are actually important artifacts created by the legendary librarian Pura Belpre. Tia Xia found them in the same way that she found the jeweled sword they’d returned in their last time travel adventure. Trouble is, these artifacts have recently gone missing from the New York Public Library, and if they’re not returned fast, Tia Xia could go to jail. As the kids try to figure out how to navigate the Great Depression, Tia Xia comes into the past, too. Will they be able to put the artifacts somewhere secure enough to be found almost a century in the future?

The issues the kids encounter with the horrible (fictional) Wilsons in the 1930s are a great illustration of the way that Latines and other minorities have both historically and currently face prejudice from white supremacists in this country (NB: you don’t have to be white to be a white supremacist, and OBVIOUSLY you’re not automatically a supremacist for being white.) The experience of people of color during the Great Depression is often overlooked today: I honestly only recognized Pura Belpre and Arturo Schomburg by name before reading about them here, and had no idea of their actual and amazing contributions to American literacy and history. This series is invaluable for bringing the past to life and highlighting details that aren’t as widely known to mainstream culture. They’re a 10/10 for introducing kids and other interested readers to the historical figures and incidents that they detail.

Unfortunately for me, this book also magnified some of the weaknesses of its predecessor in the series. Again, it felt like the action was being written around plot points that absolutely had to happen, with characters doing daft things solely to bring them from one scenario the author wanted to write about to the next. This may not bother young readers, but it made the experience far less pleasant for me as an adult. And that’s okay! As a child, I was enthralled by genre classics like Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle In Time and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising series, both of which have been completely unreadable to me since I turned twenty-five. So while I may not be the target audience for these books, they are really worthwhile in the way that they impart knowledge to their actual target audience. I’m just pleased I could learn important stuff regardless about a past that continues to be extremely and unfortunately relevant today. Perhaps more importantly, this book reminded me that while the struggle continues, progress is assured so long as we keep the faith in a better world for everyone, no matter what we look like or where we come from.

Adventure In The City Of Stories by Emma Otheguy will be published tomorrow July 21 2026 by Atheneum Books for Young Readers and is available from all good booksellers, including