KidsPost Book Club 2007
A Summer of Magical Reading
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The Bartimaeus Trilogy
by Jonathan Stroud
ages 11 and older
What's the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you?
What did you want to do to the person who embarrassed you?
Thet's the situation that 11-year-old magician-in-training Nathaniel faces in "The Amulet of Samarkand," the first book of the Bartimaeus Trilogy.
Nathaniel's life hasn't been easy. When he was 5 his parents sold him to the government to become a magician's apprentice. The magician that he learns from and lives with is the cold and cruel Arthur Underwood. Still, Nathaniel studies his magic and makes the best of his life. Then one day, just after Nathaniel's 11th birthday, ruthless magician Simon Lovelace humiliates Nathaniel in front of everyone he knows. To make matters worse, Underwood does nothing to defend the boy.
Now Nathaniel is mad -- really, really mad. He vows revenge on Lovelace and throws himself into the study of magic with a frightening ferocity. He gets good at it -- really, really good -- really, really quickly.
He's so good, in fact, that he manages to summon a 5,000-year-old djinni (pronounced jin-EE) named Bartimaeus to exact his revenge on Lovelace by stealing the powerful amulet of Samarkand.
The story is told in part from Nathaniel's point of view and in part from Bartimaeus's. Bartimaeus is wicked, laugh-out-loud funny. His chapters have footnotes, which you might not have seen before in a novel but are some of the cleverest writing you will ever read.
The other books in the trilogy are equally thrilling and funny, but reader beware: These books are a good bit darker than even the Harry Potter series. There are no pure good guys and bad guys here. Even young Nathaniel shows an at-times vicious dark side as he goes after Lovelace.
-- Tracy Grant
