Amina El Maghrabi

**Amina El Maghrabi** is a student at Deepdean and a member of the Detective Society.  She is a friend of Daisy Wells, Hazel Wong, George Mukherjee and Alexander Arcady.  She appears in Top Marks for Murder and Death Sets Sail.

## Childhood

Amina grew up in Cairo, Egypt, in a big house overlooking the River Nile. She had multiple older sisters and a French governess called Miss Beauvais who she played pranks on. Amina wanted to go to school, and she and her sisters and aunts bullied her parents into it. A naughty and rebellious student, Amina quickly went through all the schools in Cairo, including Hampden School for Ladies. She started at Deepdean School for Girls during the spring term of 1936. During the first two weeks she was late to every lesson and convinced all the mistresses she had never learned to tell the time. Some of her dormmates, Clementine, Rose and Jose, tried to bully her at first. They tried to trick her by locking her in a trunk, but she refused to get in, and ordered a hamper full of tuck and only gave it to her other dormmate, Sophie, who'd been nice all along; after that, everyone was nice to her.

## Storylines

### Top Marks for Murder

After getting caught up in a fury of murder and detecting, Daisy and Hazel return to Deepdean, only to find that Amina, who has just come to Deepdean from Cairo, Egypt, is now the most popular girl and has taken over Daisy's role, who naturally becomes furious. In the end, Amina finds Hazel and Daisy interesting, and would like to be friends with them, and although Daisy does not want to show it, she is actually glad to befriend Amina.

### Death Sets Sail

Amina invites Daisy and Hazel to Egypt, her home country, for the holidays and Alexander and George come along. When they first see the Breath of Life Society, Amina behaves resentful of them. She explains that they're essentially a cult who believes they're reincarnations of ancient Egyptian pharaohs, but they can't explain why an Egyptian pharaoh would come back as a European instead of an Egyptian, so most Egyptians ignore them. After the murder, she is eager to help with detecting and she becomes a member of the Wells and Wong Detective Society. When Daisy and Hazel need to get to a restricted area of the ship, Amina thinks of a clever prank to scare the guard away. Near the end of the book, Amina and Daisy share their first kiss.

## Personality

Amina is a frisky and kittenish girl who behaves like royalty.  She is always full of wild stories and naughtiness.  Her pranks seem to be her most unlikely yet most unladylike traits, making her the perfect undercover detective. The excessive flattery she receives does not make her arrogant, nor affect her amiable character, which makes her generally likeable.

## Relationships

In Death Sets Sail she is in a relationship with Daisy Wells. Hazel sees them kissing on the boat in Death Sets Sail. At the end of The Body in the Blitz, Amina makes a short appearance and kisses Daisy again, implying that they've remained in a relationship for the four years in between those two books.

## Appearance

Amina has smooth pale brown skin and a glossy head of dark hair, a pretty face, and feet as small as Cinderella’s.  She is regarded as ‘terribly glamorous’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘the sort of person that people make up myths about’.