Timbuktu is a city so legendary that many people doubt it’s a real place. When Aimee and her twin sister Zoe accompany their history professor father there, they pronounce the town on the edge of the Sahara deadly dull. Ignored by their father who is studying ancient manuscripts, the teenagers wish for something to amuse them. A West African djinni, a “being of fire,” answers the idle wishes by hurling all three back to the fourteenth century.
It seems their ancestors wish to have a word.
Mali in 1329 AD teems with devious djinn, mysterious griots and sorcerers, devout Muslim marabouts, and fierce Tuareg generals. Above it all reigns Mansa Kankan Musa, emperor of Africa’s legendary Golden Empire. Will he let the foreigners return to the twenty-first century with their heads still attached?
