The Amulet Of Samarkand (The Bartimaeus Sequence)

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Best Books for Young Adults Top Ten List". Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA). 30 July 2007 . Retrieved 18 July 2021. Failing to kill Nathaniel too, Lovelace implicated him to the deaths of the Underwoods, and set out to Hedlam hall to use the amulet in his plans. Luring the top echelons of the government to the hall for a conference, Lovelace wore the amulet when he used a summoning horn to summon the great demon, Ramuthra, to kill the government magicians. Through the machinations of Nathaniel and Bartimaeus, Lovelace lost the amulet again, and was subsequently eaten by Ramuthra. The demon Bartimaeus is disgusted to be successfully summoned by the ambitious twelve year old and, even more so, when Nathaniel compels him to undertake a dangerous and difficult mission. Their relationship is not cosy, but governed on either side by fear and constraint. The perspective of Bartimaeus, the millennia old demon who relates a great part of the narrative, provides a cynical, humorous and entirely unsentimental view of events.

The commoners, or the people with no magical aptitude, are either stupid or mindless cowards who spend the rest of the book just being told what to do, clueless or cowering in fear from the magicians. But I get that, we must learn to bow down to authorities but they just come off rather too compliant and dull. And if there are actually people who are willing to fight for their rights, they come off too strongly. Kitty is a teen-aged key player in the resistance. She is naive, but persistent, resilient, and somewhat resistant to magic. Her high ethical standards (as with most of the others in the resistance) are in sharp opposition to everyone else. Bartimaeus almost takes a liking to her, for her refreshing honesty, courage, and individualism. Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique: In Ptolemy's Gate, the Amulet, along with other notable items such as the Staff of Gladstone, had been sealed in the Vaults of Whitehall. John Mandrake would later view the amulet. Near the end of the book during the Great Spirit Rebellion, Nathaniel would descend again into the vaults, and claim the amulet and the Staff. The amulet protected him against the terrible pestilence that guarded the room, which killed even Verroq, who had extreme magical resilience. After using it to escape the room and make his way up to an office where Kitty had used the Gate of Ptolemy to converse with Bartimaeus in The Other Place, he gave the amulet to Kitty to protect her. The amulet would save her from one of the spirit hybrids.

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The main problem was that I disliked both of the main characters: one is a wily demon (Bartimaeus), and the other is a 12-year-old kid who is way too smart for his own good (Nathaniel). I think you'd get a similar result if you paired C.S. Lewis's Screwtape with Rowling's Draco Malfoy. Don't get me wrong - I love "The Screwtape Letters," but with nothing enlightening to learn from the demon in question, and having to read a much longer book full of it, the negativism got old. As for Nathaniel... I know he had a miserable childhood and all, but he was whiny at the best of times; at the worst, he was downright treacherous. He used words like "conscience," "justice," and "honor," but it always felt like he was acting out of guilt, ambition, and revenge. I hoped he would change over the course of the book, but I was disappointed.

The Amulet is only mentioned during the events of The Golem's Eye once when John Mandrake (Nathaniel) attempts to use the fact that he saved the Prime Minister and gave him the amulet to evade being imprisoned in the Tower of London. Nathaniel is eleven-years-old and a magician's apprentice, learning the traditional art of magic. All is well until he has a life-changing encounter with Simon Lovelace, a magician of unrivaled ruthlessness and ambition. When Lovelace brutally humiliates Nathaniel in public, Nathaniel decides to speed up his education, teaching himself spells far beyond his years. With revenge on his mind, he masters one of the toughest spells of all and summons Bartimaeus, a five-thousand-year-old djinni, to assist him. But summoning Bartimaeus and controlling him are two different things entirely, and when Nathaniel sends the djinni out to steal Lovelace's greatest treasure, the Amulet of Samarkand, he finds himself caught up in a whirlwind of magical espionage, murder and rebellion. Jonathan created a new magical world where magicians have no power of themselves. They use the spirits(imps, djinnis,afrits) to complete their every tasks through summoning and commanding them. They are arrogant, boastful, self-centered creatures(the magicians). Every magician is assigned to train an apprentice. 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.

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THE GOLEM'S EYE is an excellent sequel to the first book in the series, THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND. In the first book, we meet Bartimaeus, an ancient creature of enormous power that can best be described as a type of demon. Unfortunately, he and all of his kind hate the word demon. He classifies himself as a djinni, so we'll just go with that for the purposes of this review. Why annoy anyone who can shoot magical firebolts at you, right? Anyway, Bartimaeus, and other creatures like him, are summoned by human magicians to do their bidding. Needless to say, this forced servitude, or slavery, is not popular with the servants, so they do their best to turn the tables on their human masters whenever possible. Character For me, they were pretty much 1-dimensional. The magicians are power-hungry, self-obsessed, egoistic, with really nothing to brag about except they could control the Spirits. Most of the time, they come off very easy to manipulate. As what Bartimaeus once said, they are all driven by power and greed. Or you know, something like that. Jones, Diana Wynne (13 December 2003). "Review: The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 October 2020. 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.

The scene where Bartimaeus meets Nathaniel again is just hilarious. So is the part where Bartimaeus finally meets Kitty, whom he admires when he learns she punched Nathaniel. Notes: Too precious, wears, gets hard to care, its hero whines a lot, quite byzantine, excitement-lean, more filigree than plot. Not to compare this too much to Harry Potter, but it is one of the first series to ride the initial wave of Pottermania to greater notoriety.We may feel sympathy for the hero of Bartimaeus; a lonely, friendless young magician, subject to outrageous repression and unkindness by the adults around him, but he is not an overly sympathetic child. Far superior in ability to his mediocre master, he studies advanced magic in solitude and secrecy, for motives that are not pretty, however understandable. 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. The djinni, Bartimaeus, is cheeky and smug, but has no admirable qualities. Even helping Nathaniel is rooted in pure self-interest.