The Amulet Of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Sequence)

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Bartimaeus: the Amulet of Samarkand is highly recommended as an enthralling, darkly humorous read for older children and adults! I’ve heard people complaining of footnotes in other series, so I was a bit intimidated to start this one, but I can’t imagine the story being as good without them. A lot of the subtle adult humor takes place in the footnotes and they really allow the author to have fun with his characters and give us more depth than we would’ve gotten otherwise. I find it amusing how many people compare this book to Harry Potter. Yes, they both involve magic, but that's the end of the similarity. The very basis of magic in this book is that magicians are evil, scheming, and enjoy enslaving other beings. In Harry Potter Magic itself was pure, free to be used in any way desired. But that's all I'll say on that, as this is a review of Bartimaeus, not Harry Potter. If leaving his parents and erasing his past life isn't tough enough, Nathaniel's master, Arthur Underwood, is a cold, condescending, and cruel middle-ranking magician in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The boy's only saving grace is the master's wife, Martha Underwood, who shows him genuine affection that he rewards with fierce devotion. Nathaniel gets along tolerably well over the years in the Underwood household until the summer before his eleventh birthday. Everything changes when he is publicly humiliated by the ruthless magician Simon Lovelace and betrayed by his cowardly master who does not defend him. If the quality of a book rested solely on its plot, this would be an excellent novel. The general plot is, of course, standard fantasy fare (save the world!) but its details and the world built to drive it is unique. Also, there appears to be a second plot running under the main one which will obviously be continued in the later books, and this plot seems much more promising.

Jonathan Stroud's 2004 Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor Book acceptance speech". The Horn Book Inc. 1 January 2004 . Retrieved 17 July 2021. The whole artwork is superlative, with characters - human, magical or otherwise - simply and well defined. Nathaniel is a boy magician-in-training, sold to the government by his birth parents at the age of five and sent to live as an apprentice to a master. Powerful magicians rule Britain, and its empire, and Nathaniel is told his is the "ultimate sacrifice" for a "noble destiny." This has everything, extremely good writing, a fresh, new setting that still hasn´t been assimilated by mainstream, many ideas from classic mythology, an alternative history uchronia setting, and just loads of innuendos and jokes that are definitively aimed at adults and kids alike.

Fantasy Series We Recommend

You know, I've tried but I have not become a huge fan of graphic novels. I enjoy the artwork, but generally speaking the stories aren't that well re-told. For example, when I read the first volume of the "Ender's Game" graphic, I thought they did a good job of re-telling the tale, but there was quite a bit of the essence of the story that was lost. And perhaps that's what people are looking for, the "Readers Digest" version of these books. Stroud lives in St Albans, Hertfordshire, with his two children, Isabelle and Arthur, and his wife Gina, an illustrator of children's books. The artwork in this book is very striking, and I think this graphic novel did a great job leaving the main essence of the story in place. Like any movie adaptation, a graphic adaptation of a novel will have to change a few details and leave things out, but this story was just as engaging as the original. I highly recommend it to anyone. I read this one as a book group read – it came up during a discussion that none of us had properly read a graphic novel before and we wanted to give it a try.

It's tempting to compare the book to the Harry Potter series. Young boy. Magic. Sneaking around. Breaking the rules. Stern teachers. But the similarities really end there. For those who didn't get the title, Simon Jones is probably best known by some as the voice of Arthur Dent in the BBC's TV and radio adaptations of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. But he does an excellent job of narrating audiobooks from what I've heard, particularly here.Now, Stroud's magical rules, the key to success in the genre, are simple, spirits control magic, magicians control spirits. Now, if Krazy Christians thought Harry Potter was warping little kids' minds, then I'm surprised they haven't caught on to this series, with its pentacle circles and summoning "demons." Story-wise, this first installment in The Bartimaeus Trilogy is respectably good. However, the writing failed to appeal to me in many ways that, were they not already in my possession, I might not even bother with the next two books. Jonathan Stroud somehow manages to write with so much distance between the narrator(s) and the readers — even when he’s telling the story in first person through Bartimaeus. This is partly because Bartimaeus is vain and patronizing, but mostly because even the first-person narrative sounds like a third-person omniscient storyteller is telling it, only with “I’s”. That and a whole lot more suggest this book is a faithful adaptation, cherishing the original and only making it more vivid.

Stroud's use of footnotes, far from being distracting is actually quite infectious. Bartimaeus, in the manner of a quietly comic George Burns, well aware of his own comedic skills, steps out of character and out of the story in the footnotes, to offer his own sotto voce observations and asides directly to the reading audience. Judiciously sprinkled throughout the novel, Stroud has kept their number and length at exactly the right level to ensure the high-speed plot is not dampened.The graphic novel seemed to give a complete overview of the book, but it still didn't jog my memory. I was disappointed that while my favourite scene was almost certainly from here, it didn't make it into image form. This book is very cleverly written, with two alternating strands of narration. One in the third person, tells the story mainly from the point of view of Nathaniel. The other strand gives us a different perspective on the characters and events but it is in the first person, from the point of view of the devious, superior and sarcastic otherworldly being Bartimaeus.

If you know a boy between 10 and 13 (or younger, if you like reading aloud), give him this book for Christmas. This is not to say that girls will not find it enthralling too; just that the sort of cynical derision Bartimeus displays towards his youthful master, and magicians in general, chimes so well with the mindset of so many boys of around that age that they'll be demanding the next books in the trilogy for their birthdays. Having said that, I can't wait for volume two either.

In the final book of the trilogy, published 2005, Nathaniel is a senior magician and a member of the ruling council, an elite class of magicians in the government. Bartimaeus is still trapped on Earth by Nathaniel and is treated with disdain, continuously weakening as he is not allowed to return to the Other Place. Meanwhile, Kitty Jones has been hiding undercover and completing her research on magic and spirits. She hopes that this will enable her to break the endless cycles of conflicts between djinn and humans. The main plot of this story is a conspiracy to overthrow the government which causes the most dangerous threat in the history of magic. Together, Nathaniel, Bartimaeus and Kitty try to save the city of London from this dangerous threat. stars!] Hands-down this is my favorite middle-grade read since Mull’s Fablehaven series almost two decades ago!