Juman Malouf’s The Trilogy of Two Sends Twin Sisters on a Magical Journey

The Trilogy of Two, by Juman Malouf, is perfect for readers of 11 and up who enjoy dark, almost dystopian, magical fantasy books in which there are plenty of bright imaginings to lighten the journey.
In a future world where most people live stacked in high rises in giant cities, whose lower levels are flooded, a future almost devoid of animals and green and growing things, 12 year old twins Charlotte and Sonja live a life outside the cities, performing music for a traveling circus. They love their foster mother, Tattie, whose marvelously tattooed body is covered with images of extraordinarily magical places and the beings who live there, but that is the only sort of magic they know until their own gift for music starts going strangely, uncontrollably wrong. After one performance levitates the entire audience, the circus master refuses to let them play again, and worse still, the strange happenings draw the attention of the Enforcers of the Rain City. Even more disturbingly, the girls become targets of two sinister city dwellers who are determined to harvest all magic to use for their own sinister purposes, and the girls are visited in the night by the cat who is their tool, who (very creepily) sucks their talents for both music and magic right out of them.
Charlotte and Sonja aren’t the only victims, and the bad guys have their sights set on an even greater source of magic—the magical lands portrayed on Tattie’s body. When she is kidnapped by them, the twins find themselves traveling to these places they’d never believed were real, trying to organize their inhabitants to fight back.

What follows is a kaleidoscopic fantasia of magical wonders. And though the twins are awed and amazed by what they see, their journey is still a dark one. Not only are they desperately anxious for their mother, for the other victims of magic theft, and for the fate of the magical lands, but for the first time in their lives they are moving away from each other, and the bond between them is being stretched scarily thin. Yet if they are to defeat the enemy, they must believe in themselves, and in each other…
The novel’s numerous illustrations add to the sense of distant magical strangeness; a feeling that is there right from the beginning, when readers are plunged into the dark world of the city, and which intensifies as the journey leads to the final, brutal confrontation. Those who welcome surreal and the not entirely explicable wonders in their fantasy journeys will find much to appreciate here, but it is the relationship between the two sisters that is at the heart of the book, as the unquestioning dependence on each other of their childhood is fiercely jostled by both external danger, and by the facts of growing up.

This isn’t one for most younger middle grade readers (9 and 10 years old); the violence is grim and disturbing at times, and the girls are both beginning to consider the opposite sex in a growing-up (though still age-appropriate) way. The story is twisty, and requires a strong focus from the reader to keep track of who everyone is and what they are doing. I’d give it to the imaginative 5th or 6th grader who delights in imaginative, quirky world building, and who doesn’t mind giving firm attention to a story. Fans of Colin Meloy’s Wildwood books, or Catherynne M. Valente’s Fairyland series, for example, might well love this one too.