thesonorista 's review for:

The Golem's Eye by Jonathan Stroud

4.0

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The Bartimaeus series is unlike any other children/teen fantasy series I have read and that's a good thing. The Golem's Eye picks up shortly after the events of The Amulet of Samarkand. We know going in that the magicians of London aren't very nice, a ruling class based on one-upmanship, wealth, secrecy and back-stabbing, but it seemed our young hero, Nathaniel, might be guided by his teachers and his djinni acquaintance, Bartimaeus, to be a new kind of magician, a better, kinder magician. Nope. The kid's a jerk.

And that, right there sets this apart from anything I've read for this age group. Bartimaeus himself is his usual zinger-throwing, Rosetta-stone breaking, quick-thinking djinni and his chapters are a joy to read. But we also have a third character here, Kitty, and while her story is important, and feeds into what will be the overarching story of the trilogy, Stroud has to devote a lot of pages to her backstory to catch us up, and it means this book just isn't as engaging as the first.

But read about the djinni, the jerk and the revolutionary, because it's funny, a great magical mystery, and Stroud is writing a larger story with this trilogy, a darker, and yet more redemptive than anything like it.