Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy

Jorge is on top of his aunt’s garage roof in Miami because a snob from next door dared him to do a handstand up there. From that height he sees something no fifth grader is meant to see: his aunt, a history museum curator who forgets to charge her phone, crawling into the giant clay pot in her front yard with a jewelled sword, and vanishing. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy starts with a dare and a disappearance, and within three chapters Jorge and his two cousins have tumbled after her onto a silent beach, into a paper-covered boat, and across a sea that turns out to be made of time.

Three Cousins in the Time of Magic

The real engine of the book is the trio, and Otheguy gives each cousin a clear shape. Siggy, the oldest, is a seventh grader who runs a small social channel, polishes his sneakers on camera and is desperate to be invited to the right pool party. Camila, a year older than Jorge, is a quiet reader who loves animals and has been told since preschool that keeping her daredevil cousin alive is her job. Jorge climbs everything, takes every dare and cannot be contained.

The chapters rotate between them, and each one gets a proper arc. Siggy’s talent for charm, which looks shallow on the first pages, becomes the tool that keeps him alive in a very tight corner. Camila, who thinks of herself as timid, discovers that she was only ever afraid for Jorge, never for herself. Jorge learns that being fast and fearless can help people rather than just worry them.

Their bickering is the best-written thing in the book. They mock each other, gang up on their aunt’s history lectures (a standing cousins’ pact forbids letting her start one), and then close ranks the second one of them is in danger. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy understands that siblings and cousins can annoy each other and adore each other in the same breath.

Their aunt, Tía Xía, is a delight when she is on the page: frizzy-haired, gap-toothed, loud, prone to blasting Celia Cruz and Bad Bunny, and far braver than she looks. The magic in her yard runs on unlikely objects, including a tub of cheap hair product from a tiny Latino brand that turns everything faintly green. It is a running joke that pays off beautifully.

Two Wars, Three Cousins, One Time of Magic

The second thread, and the book’s real argument, is historical. The Garai, the aunt’s time-travelling boat, drops the cousins first in May 1862 on the Virginia Peninsula, in the middle of the American Civil War. They are shelled by a Confederate ironclad, rescued by Alfonso, a Cuban-American drummer boy searching for his father, and helped by Oscar, an enslaved boy whose own father has been sold away. Alfonso’s father is a Union balloonist, inspired by the real Federico Fernández Cavada, a Cuban-born officer who spied on Confederate lines from the air.

From Virginia, the story moves to Mexico and the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862, the victory Cinco de Mayo actually commemorates. There the cousins meet Pascuala, a Nahua girl who delivers tortillas to the Mexican army and knows every tunnel under the city.

The point Otheguy is making, spelled out in a terrific author’s note, is that these two stories are usually taught as unrelated. They were connected. France invaded Mexico because the United States was busy with its own war, and a French victory would have handed the Confederacy a friendly European power on its border. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy turns that textbook connection into a chase, and a young reader will come away understanding it far better than from a worksheet.

It also takes on the question of what “Latino” means. The word was taken up in the nineteenth century by the very French empire trying to rule Mexico, and the cousins, Pascuala and their new friends argue their way to a definition built on solidarity rather than blood or religion. For readers who have only met Cinco de Mayo as a party with plastic sombreros, as the snobbish neighbour plans in the opening chapters, this is a real corrective.

What works

• The history is precise. Otheguy holds a history PhD, and small details land: hardtack, route ciphers, telegraph taps, hydrogen generators on wagons, a sudden hailstorm on the battlefield.
• The underdogs lead. An enslaved boy, a drummer boy and an Indigenous girl are the ones who save the day, which is exactly the point the book is making.
• The back matter. Special notes separate fact from invention, and a glossary and further reading list make Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy a ready-made classroom book.
• The pace. Short chapters, a chase in every location and cliffhanger endings make it an easy read-aloud, with illustrations by Poly Bernatene at key moments.

Where Cousins in the Time of Magic Gives Ground

• Tía Xía is missing for most of it. The most vivid adult in the book is captured early, so her energy is badly missed in the middle chapters.
• The villains are flat. The Confederate generals and a monarchist who kidnaps one of the cousins exist to be wrong and say so at length.
• The lessons show. The cousins mock their aunt’s lectures, yet several conversations become exactly that, with characters explaining history to each other.
• The magic stays vague. How the boats work, and why only the cousins can sail them, is left for later books, and some rescues lean on convenient timing.

Content Notes

Content notes: wartime violence including cannon fire, gunfire and a child held at rifle point; slavery and the sale of a parent away from his child; racist language from historical villains; an adult physically threatening and roughly handling a child; the remembered death of a parent. Nothing is graphic, and Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy suits readers of about eight to twelve.

Read These Next

Five for readers who finish Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy and want more:

1. The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe by Karen Foxlee. Another middle-grade adventure rooted in a vividly realised historical place.
2. Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber. A funny, heartfelt middle-grade novel about family and working out who you are.
3. The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan. For kids who like their history and myth delivered as a wisecracking quest.
4. Dactyl Hill Squad by Daniel José Older. Civil War New York with dinosaurs, recommended in Otheguy’s own reading list.
5. The Best Historical Fiction Books That Will Make You Travel Through Time. Our guide to historical fiction for the grown-ups reading along.

Otheguy’s earlier books include the middle-grade novels Sofía Acosta Makes a Scene and Silver Meadows Summer, and The Unicorn Rescue Society: The Madre de Aguas of Cuba, co-written with Adam Gidwitz.

The Last Word

The detail I keep returning to is the trail of bougainvillea petals. Jorge grabs a fistful of hot-pink flowers from the garage roof in the first chapter, carries them through two countries and a century, and eventually uses them to leave a path for a lost cousin. A bit of Miami, dropped in the grass of 1862 Mexico, turns out to be exactly what family is for.

Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy sometimes pauses to explain itself, and its adults are thinner than its children. But it is warm, funny and genuinely illuminating, and it treats young readers as people who can handle real history. It feels like the start of a series, and Tía Xía’s fleet of time boats is not finished yet.