The balloon comes down at sunrise. It has been drifting all night with three children curled in the bottom of a small wicker basket painted with stars and stripes, and now the ground is rushing up to meet it: church towers, red roofs, a wide stone plaza where a crowd is gathering to stare. The netting catches on a bell tower, tears free, and the basket skids across the flagstones until an iron gate stops it. The people of Puebla, braced for a French invasion, back away from the strangers who have just fallen out of the sky. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy reaches this moment about halfway through, and by then its young heroes have already survived a Confederate ironclad, a general’s party and a very long walk on nothing but hardtack.
The Cousins and the Time of Magic
The children are Siggy, Camila and Jorge, three cousins from Miami who spend every Monday afternoon at the house of their aunt, a scatterbrained curator at a Latin history museum. On one of those Mondays, they follow her into the enormous clay pot on her lawn and find themselves on a silent beach beside a set of half-finished boats. One of them carries them across a sea of time to May 1862.
Otheguy makes each cousin distinct from the first scene. Siggy, a seventh grader anxious to be popular, runs a tiny online channel and cares a great deal about his shoes. Camila reads constantly, loves animals and carries the family’s expectation that she will keep her younger cousin safe. Jorge, the youngest, lives to take dares. The chapters shift between their points of view, so each child gets to be the hero of a scene and each gets to be wrong.
What a family reading group will enjoy most is how they talk. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy is full of the teasing, sulking and sudden loyalty that anyone with siblings will recognise, and the cousins have a pact that nobody lets their aunt start a history lecture. It is a good joke, because the book itself is a history lesson in disguise.
Two Stories Told as One
The disguise works because the history is genuinely exciting. The cousins land first on the Virginia Peninsula during the Civil War, where they team up with Alfonso, a young Union drummer with a Cuban father who has vanished while spotting from a balloon. The father is inspired by Federico Fernández Cavada, a real Cuban-born officer who sketched enemy positions from the air. They are helped by Oscar, an enslaved boy whose father has been sold away to Cuba, and whose courage saves them more than once.
Then the balloon carries them south to Puebla on the eve of the battle that Cinco de Mayo remembers. There they meet Pascuala, a Nahua girl who sells tortillas to the soldiers and moves through the city unnoticed by the adults around her.
Otheguy’s author’s note explains the connection that ties the halves together. Napoleon III invaded Mexico while the United States was fighting itself, and a French victory would have given the Confederacy a sympathetic empire right across its border. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy makes that link feel obvious rather than academic, and children who read it will never again hear Cinco de Mayo described as Mexican Independence Day without correcting someone.
What a Word Can Be Made to Mean
The richest thread for discussion is about the word “Latino”. The cousins arrive assuming it simply means people like them. Along the way they meet an adult who is proud of his “pure” European blood, learn that the French were using the word to justify an empire, and sit in a lamplit tunnel with Pascuala, working out what they actually have in common. Their answer is not language, religion or skin colour, since they differ in all three. It is a shared refusal to be ruled by kings and a belief in sticking up for one another.
It is an unusually thoughtful conversation for a middle-grade adventure. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy trusts children to hold two ideas at once, that a word can be used against people and then reclaimed by them, and it gives a family or class a great deal to talk about, whatever their own background.
Reading the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy Aloud
This is a strong choice for reading aloud or for a parent and child book club. The chapters are short, each location has its own chase, and the back matter includes special notes that separate fact from invention, a glossary and a reading list. A few reservations are worth knowing before you start:
- The aunt, the liveliest adult, is offstage for most of the story.
- The villains, including two Confederate generals and a Mexican monarchist, are more speeches than people.
- Some conversations stop the plot so that someone can explain a historical point.
None of this spoils the fun, and younger readers are unlikely to mind.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with Camila. Everyone in her family has told her she is the careful one, and she has come to believe it means she is timid. Ask the group whether being responsible and being brave can be the same thing, and when Camila realises it.
Then ask about Siggy and the party. Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy opens with him desperate to go to a neighbour’s Cinco de Mayo party decorated with sombreros. Ask why that invitation matters so much to him at the start, and whether the adults in the book who care about fancy ancestors remind the group of anyone they know.
Finally, ask about Pascuala’s claim that being overlooked can be a kind of superpower. Is she right? Ask who else in the book is underestimated, and what they manage to do because of it.
For families who want more, The Wondrous Tale of Lavender Wolfe by Karen Foxlee is another middle-grade adventure with a real historical setting. Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions by Ahmad Saber suits readers who liked the family warmth and the questions about identity. The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan offers another funny, fast quest. And Dactyl Hill Squad by Daniel José Older, which Otheguy recommends herself, takes Civil War history somewhere wilder still.
Final Thoughts
Cousins in the Time of Magic by Emma Otheguy is a book about family that happens to be a book about history, or perhaps the other way around. Its grown-ups are sketched lightly and it sometimes pauses to teach. But its children are vivid, its history is accurate and surprising, and its central idea is generous: that the people who came before us are part of our family too. With another time boat still being built, this feels like the start of a series that families will want to follow together.