The book, inspired clearly by Harry Potter if not Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books, was ok. The two protagonists, a set of twins who discover that they are djinn with magical powers, felt cookie cutter and never really seemed to break out of the mold.

To make things worse, there were a fair number of xenophobic comments spread throughout the book, the French receiving a good number of shots (hygiene being the number one thing attacked) though Egyptians were not far behind.

Coming at the book with adult sensibilities, I was clearly more sensitive than my 10 year old daughter who just breezed by these blissfully unaware.

That said, the combination of fairly mediocre writing and near-bigotry (or to be generous just poorly honed humor) was tough to get past. The final straw was the author, who is quite prolific and this is nowhere near his first, or even tenth, book made a mess of the pacing. A major new villain was introduced in the last few chapters and dealing with them felt hurried and poorly executed, neatly solved by a little deus ex machina.

Nowhere near the worst book I've ever read, hence a non-one star rating, it was bad enough that I have no interest in reading the rest of the series.