KINGDOM KEEPERS

A boy who lives in an elite residential community at Walt Disney World’s Epcot amusement park is unwittingly thrust into a real, magical battle on his 13th birthday.

Eli Whitman has grown up in the Epcot CommuniTree, surrounded by amusement park magic. Unbeknownst to Eli and his friends, their parents are among the fabled Kingdom Keepers, those whose heroics protected the amusement parks from Disney villains in an eponymous prequel series. When Eli attempts to use his father’s real sword in a holographic video game, he accidentally cuts a hole in the space-time continuum and is kidnapped to an alternate-reality Disney version of the real Morocco, where he encounters the descendants of Aladdin and Jafar. Jafar’s grandson Carnius is a powerful sultan plotting to kill the Kingdom Keepers. The fast-paced plot diverges, sometimes confusingly, in numerous directions as it follows Eli, his pals the Kingdom Kids, and everyone’s parents as all try to figure out and defeat the new evil threatening their world. A family tree of the original Kingdom Keepers and Kingdom Kids would have been helpful. Eli’s mother is described as part Asian (the rest of her ancestry is unspecified); his father is White. The depictions of Morocco and the Moroccan characters are reflective of the Aladdin Disney movie universe. A slur for Roma people is casually included without comment.

An overloaded story.