How to Get Magically Popular – at a glance
The School Reading Lists’ five word review: Magic, chakra, popular, friends, betrayal.
Children’s book title: How to Get Magically Popular.
Children’s author: Radhika Sanghani.
Genre: Children’s fiction.
Published by: Usborne.
ISBN: 9781805318286.
Recommended for children aged: 9-12 year-olds.
First published: Paperback August 2025.
This children’s book is ideal for: helping understand the value of self and how being true to ourselves and living in the now will help prepare us for our futures.
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Our review:
Sabina Patel has just started Year 8 in a new school, which means everyone has already made friends and found their place. Her mum has opened a new beauty business, which is why they moved from London to the country in the first place, and is working long hours seven days a week so she doesn’t see much of her either!
Her new school, commonly known as MG, is very different to her old one and it’s in her yoga and meditation class that everything changes. She’s always meditated with her mum but now she’s connecting with her chakras and suddenly her sight is enhanced but, even more amazing, she can now see the future!
When the two most popular girls in class work out what’s happened, they decide Sabina, who they call Sabrina, is their new bestie. Friends have been hard to come by, and so she’s delighted when they and another classmate called Faye want to spend time with her, but as news spreads, her visions soon become hijacked. Having started to see some disturbing things, Sabina desperately tries to change people’s future, but can she really do that, or will everything change again and not for the better?
Our verdict:
Sabina Patel is a typical twelve-year-old, or she would be if she was still at her old inner-city school. Instead she is now trying to fit in at a school where appearance, position, and where you live are paramount. Unfortunately, as the new girl, the only one with Indian heritage in her class, who knows no one and lives on the wrong side of the village, she’s at an immediate disadvantage. Finding she can see into the future changes everything. She is suddenly known to everyone and, as friends of the popular girls, known as the Leeshes, treated totally differently.
The changes between Sabina when she spends her days alone and after her powers are revealed is well done. Her conflicts, caused both by her visions and her reactions to them, show how sometimes what we think we want isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The friendship with Faye, a very clever and equally lonely classmate, flounders as the Leeshes monopolise her time until, as she tries to be everything to everyone, her powers, relationships and rationality begin to suffer. Can she pull everything together or have her new abilities ruined everything?
There are a lot of things Sabina gets wrong as she tries to do everything she thinks her friends and family want and need. Her realisation that she should have done things differently, shared her fears earlier and trusted herself is an unpleasant set of lessons for her to learn, but once again this is dealt with sympathetically.
Teaching points and book club discussion ideas:
- Starting a new school is always difficult, but for Sabina, it had been extra hard as her home life had also changed. How important was being able to contact her old friends?
- If you had to choose between having enhanced vision or seeing into the future, which would you choose and why?
- If you were running for form prefect, what would your platform be? Who would you have voted for at Sabina’s school?
- In a cross-curricular activity with art, design either an election poster or one for a winter/Christmas ball. What are the important things to make sure you put on your poster?
- How would you feel if you were able to have yoga/meditation lessons at school? Would you sign up?
- If you could see the future just once, what would you try to find out?
Many thanks to Usborne for the review copy.
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