Review of the Day: The Genie Game by Jordan Ifueko

The Genie Game
By Jordan Ifueko
Illustrated by AI (Magnific)(oh… we’ll get to that)
Amulet (an imprint of Abrams)
$19.99
ISBN: 978-1-4197-6437-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves now

When you’re an adult reviewing a book for kids, you are automatically placed in the awkward position of not being the intended audience for that title. Even if it’s the best book in the world, what you get out of it is going to be different than what a kid does. And the lens through which you read the book varies wildly from adult to adult as well. There’s the parent lens, the teacher lens, the librarian lens, and the reviewer lens. Oh. And one more. The fellow children’s author lens. Since I ascribe to four of those five descriptions, I never really know how I’ll read a middle grade novel for kids when I pick it up. To my infinite surprise, upon starting The Genie Game I found myself reading this book as another children’s author. I was admiring Ifueko’s ability to plunge the reader IMMEDIATELY into an alternate America, world building with enviable efficiency and speed. Reading further, that lens shifted. Now I was a reviewer, agog over the author’s seemingly effortless ability to meld character development for a bunch of different people within a social commentary (and social justice) format. And then it’s fun! So so so so fun! If I was a kid I would get a HUGE kick out of this book! By the time I was done I discovered that I was reading it like a child would. Which is to say, I’m now hungry for more. Adept and incredible, The Genie Game looks like fluff, but packs a wallop when it comes to storytelling panache.

Kind of weird. Nobody can remember Mango anymore. Nobody, except her younger 13-year-old sister Valentine. Valentine (who dreams of someday becoming a feared and fabulous film director) was sent a strange letter and now she’s the only person in the world to remember she has (had?) an older sister who disappeared months ago. Where is she? After receiving a mysterious text message, Valentine goes to a small boba café, only to find herself sucked into immortality against her will. Valentine is now a player in The Genie Game. As a genie herself, her goal is to answer as many wishes as possible for the three corporations that rule everything in her world. She doesn’t have magic powers, but she does have an inability to age, brains, and along the way a crew of good friends who will help her with her ultimate goal: Finding Mango. Trouble is, it’s hard to know who to trust in this game. You may even find you can’t trust yourself.

As I mentioned before, Ifueko’s ability to dive straight into her story, world building as she runs headlong towards to the plot, may strike some as a bit jarring, but I thought it was brilliant. As the sheer length of this review might indicate, I like to indulge in a plethora of words. And sometimes, if I’m writing a novel for kids, I put an excessive number on the page before I let my readers get to the fun stuff. Not so Jordan Ifueko. She just makes it shiny and fun and weird (snot rain?) within two or three chapters, and it’s like you’re belted into a roller coaster. Good luck getting off! By the time Valentine is a part of The Genie Game we are a scant 30 pages in. Valentine’s life in the game also seems to resemble the video game The Sims to a vast degree. She can update anything in her life by using a kind of virtual mall that, the way it’s described in the book, sure as heck sounds like how you scroll through options in The Sims. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Ifueko is purposefully pulling in video game imagery alongside social media apps and streaming shows. In the year 2026, there may never be a book that is MORE 2026 than this title.

The way I’ve been describing this book to people is to compare it to other books out there. So, just as The Hunger Games was a commentary on reality TV, The Genie Game is a commentary on social media and influencers. Valentine’s popularity in the world of genies has nothing to do with her popularity in the real world, and yet a person can easily game the system if they hack both. One of the characters in the book, DumDumDerek, is this beautifully rendered influencer. A real advantage of listening to the audiobook of The Genie Game is how, after hearing his Mr. Beast-like patter, you have a hard time not hearing it in real life as well. That’s one of the beautiful things about this book. It’s so immersive that it’s impossible not to draw real world comparisons between the corporations and their advertisements (and shills) on the page and in your real life. In her Author’s Note at the end, Ifueko makes that eminently clear, pointing out that ten powerful companies, “control most of the food you buy and eat.”

It’s that fearsome attitude towards not simply making a book fun but also socially conscious that sets The Genie Game truly apart from the middle grade fantasy (or is it science fiction?) pack. Mango, Valentine’s missing older sister, is (as we get to know her in flashbacks) an activist. The trouble is, she running headlong into their first generation immigrant parents’ attitudes about what success in America looks like. Ifueko has some surprisingly harsh takes on the fear that guides these parental decisions about what’s truly important (it feels personal), but then the activism starts to ramp up. It’s worth pointing out that the injustices that Valentine witnesses aren’t fantastical in the least. They’re the kinds of things that the kids reading this book would at least be glancingly familiar with. Local businesses getting shut out by money hungry corporations (who specifically target the areas in which they operate). Or farm workers harmed by the chemicals of the plants they work with, getting dismissed when they try to unionize. What really amazed me were Valentine’s solutions to these problems. Apathy is a HUGE villain in this book (rendered as a literal gargantuan monster) but what doesn’t have to be said is that there’s a lot of apathy surrounding these everyday problems. How do you break through and get people to feel? Consistently, Ifueko lets Valentine not only use her brains but her special skills as an up-and-coming filmmaker to make a difference. Better still, I found myself believing in her results. At its heart, a lot of this book is about Valentine discovering the power of documentary to make social change. Incredible.

My sole objection (and it’s not even the author’s fault) is the art. Not the cover art, mind you. That was done by Raymond Sebastien and it’s relatively incredible. If someone were to say to me, “Hey! Create a sparkly gingham dress” I would just probably stare blankly at you and gape like a fish for a while. Sebastien, however, has managed to work in the book’s missing dog, teddy, tacos, boba, and more, while also featuring Valentine’s signature purple beret and a pretty good rendition of all the characters. So that art? That art is awesome. I’m talking about the ads inside the book. Peppered on the pages are all kinds of fake ads for Valentine’s world, many of which are hilarious. Thanks to Ifueko’s sense of humor there’s a real dark streak that runs under a number of them (like the ad to support legislation to roll back child worker laws (“Childhood is fleeting. Make every second profitable”) and one for a seemingly innocent dog collar that will alert you when they have any disease (“Heartworms detected. Life expectancy: 12.7 months. Pre-order new pooch?”). The text on these? Fabulous. The art? AI. This may actually be the first time I’ve seen AI art in a legitimate children’s book from a major publisher and I’m, to put it mildly, appalled. Y’all, were you not aware of your cover artist? Bet he would have liked to take on the work. Everything has that awful glossy look to it. Abrams did its author and children’s book illustrators everywhere dirty with this art (which is credited to “Freepik”, now renamed “Magnific” if you look into it). For a book that speaks out against abuses of big corporations, this seems downright insidious. And don’t go saying that that’s the point of using it, by the way. You cannot convince me that the only reason they used an AI program to create the art was because the ads come from evil corporations that would use AI programs to create art. Cute attempt. No dice.

I popped over to Jordan Ifueko’s website and saw that the description of this book is “Harriet the Spy meet Black Mirror”. I dunno. Sure Valentine does some investigating, but her brains make her such a powerful force that even the rulers of the corporations begin to fear her. I love that about this book. It’s just so friggin’ satisfying to see a Black girl kicking ass, taking names, and doing it all with a sense of humor and a minimal number of personal traumas. And it’s friggin’ fun! I know I keep coming back to this point, but fun is a rarity in children’s book publishing these days. Goofy fun is even rarer if you’re not a white cis-gender kid (preferably a boy). The fact that this author is able to create something so kid-friendly while also working in social justice and advice on activism is nothing short of incredible. You want great writing but also a book you could hand to a kid and that they’d actually be excited to read? Let me tell you, I’ve never been so jealous of the children’s librarians out there that get to booktalk this title to their students. This is the smart little book you’re going to be thinking about long after you reluctantly reach that last page. More like this, please!

On shelves now.

Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2026, Reviews, Reviews 2026