Take a photo of a barcode or cover
pmwals09 's review for:
The Amulet of Samarkand
by Jonathan Stroud
The Amulet of Samarkand is the beginning of a trilogy featuring the (mis)adventures of the djinni Bartimaeus and the magician Nathaniel/John Mandrake. Summoned for what he thinks is just a routine showcase, Bartimaeus is unpleasantly surprised when he is given a fairly difficult task. Completing it, Bartimaeus and the young magician both discover they have interrupted the plans of powerful government figures, and must fight to stop them and save themselves. The book is full of humor (not all of which is intended for its typically adolescent audience) and narrow escapes, and serves as a good read for anybody hankering for post-Harry Potter fantasy reading.
The story is fairly straightforward, it's main selling point being the excellent storyworld Mr. Stroud has created. Although I do not wish to compare the two, this novel succeeds where Harry Potter also succeeded: the fantasy worlds are close enough to reality that we may easily relate to what is happening, but sufficiently different that it presents old problems (greed, power-mongering and corruption chiefly, but also elitism and slavery as well) in a new light. For anybody interested, another series of books that accomplishes this well is the Artemis Fowl series.
Apart from these themes - common to so many novels, particularly in Young Adult fiction - an interesting note is the similarity between magic in the novel and science in the real world. I take the similarity as a warning to what overdependence can do to us, depriving us of most of humanities virtues. That being said, I am told that the final book in the series is about redemption through selfless acts, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't speak to the message of the trilogy as a whole. And even if I had, a review of the first book would not be the place for it.
As much as I enjoyed reading the book, I found that it was primarily the world created by Mr. Stroud and the difficulties of Nathaniel and Bartimaeus (hardly anything unique to literature) that attracted me to this novel. It's pretty good, but it didn't knock my socks off. If I could give 3.75 stars I would, but I just don't think it's deserving of 4 (sorry, Mr. Stroud).
The story is fairly straightforward, it's main selling point being the excellent storyworld Mr. Stroud has created. Although I do not wish to compare the two, this novel succeeds where Harry Potter also succeeded: the fantasy worlds are close enough to reality that we may easily relate to what is happening, but sufficiently different that it presents old problems (greed, power-mongering and corruption chiefly, but also elitism and slavery as well) in a new light. For anybody interested, another series of books that accomplishes this well is the Artemis Fowl series.
Apart from these themes - common to so many novels, particularly in Young Adult fiction - an interesting note is the similarity between magic in the novel and science in the real world. I take the similarity as a warning to what overdependence can do to us, depriving us of most of humanities virtues. That being said, I am told that the final book in the series is about redemption through selfless acts, but I haven't read it yet, so I can't speak to the message of the trilogy as a whole. And even if I had, a review of the first book would not be the place for it.
As much as I enjoyed reading the book, I found that it was primarily the world created by Mr. Stroud and the difficulties of Nathaniel and Bartimaeus (hardly anything unique to literature) that attracted me to this novel. It's pretty good, but it didn't knock my socks off. If I could give 3.75 stars I would, but I just don't think it's deserving of 4 (sorry, Mr. Stroud).