The Amulet of Samarkand

by Jonathan Stroud

Book Overview

Presenting a thrilling new voice in children's literature-a witty, gripping adventure story featuring a boy and his not-so-tame djinni. Nathaniel is a young magician's apprentice, taking his first... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 078681859X
• ISBN13: 9780786818594
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Hyperion Books for Children
• Length: 462 Pages
• Weight: 1.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.8" x 8.5"
• Age Range: 10 to 14 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 9

Customer Reviews

Better than Harry Potter.

As great or Better than Harry Potter. I say it's Better, because it's Funny.

I read it in a week

I have read this book and the 2 that followed in 3 weeks it only took me a week it read each one this is a great story about magic and how one boy had learned power of friendship I would recommend this for ages 12 and up for it is a great story

Love the Book But Wrong Cover :(

It’s been years since I’ve read this series and just like someone else has mentioned, I ordered a hardcover with the Gargoyle on it. But instead when I received the book, it was the wrong cover and I’m pretty sad because now the books won’t match. I highly recommend this book but be careful because you just might get the wrong cover.

Great book

I love this book and can’t wait to read the rest of the series.

Not just for kids

The boy Nathaniel is a wizard's apprentice in a London ruled by magicians (shades of Harry Potter and Christopher Moore's "Practical Demonkeeping," not to mention Randall Garrett's stuffy old Lord Darcy). London itself is decadent, its libraries abandoned and decaying. A class war between the Muggles--excuse me, Commoners--- and their magician lords has reached the stage where bombs are thrown into Westminster Abbey, the magicians' seat-of-power. While this book isn't packed with cutesy details like ear-wax jellybeans, it does feature some frothing-at-the-mouth, rompin', stompin', eye-shriveling demons, including the narrator Bartimaeus, who would prefer to be called a djinni, thank you. Do what he says. He's 5,000 years old and is not very happy about humans, especially 11-year-old Nathaniel, who managed to bind the djinni into servitude and forced him to steal the mysterious Amulet of Samarkand from a very powerful, very nasty magician named Lovelace. The story takes place in a slightly altered modern-day London. Gladstone was the first really powerful magician-ruler of Great Britain, and fought a famous magical duel with Disraeli, who had made a rude remark about Gladstone's lady friend. Commoners aren't completely without power. Some of them have the ability to detect magical devices, which serves our hero, Nathaniel an ill turn when he is hiding from just about everyone in a ruined library, and a commoner steals his scrying glass. "The Amulet of Samarkand's" plot has more twists and turns than a troupe of Sitherian sword jugglers. There is plenty of witty dialogue, mainly supplied by Bartimaeus, who reminds me of Disney's fast-talking genie in "Aladdin." Same cheek. Same jive. Be sure to read his copious footnotes. They're a highlight of this book, along with: * A breathless, derring-do plot. * Dense, satisfying background detail. * A wild ending with magic galore and a monster that munches djinni like hors-d'oeuvres before the main course of an entire magicians' convention. * A roiling jihad of multi-powered, multi-purpose demons from the sassy, Cockney-speaking imp in Nathaniel's scrying glass to the thing that comes out of the dimensional rift at the magicians' convention. This fantasy is not just for kids.

Harry Potter meets Artemis Fowl meets Mission Impossible

12-year-old Nathaniel lives in a fantastical London in which the ruling class are all magicians; as is the tradition, his parents sold him as an apprentice magician when he was only 6. He lives in the attic of his master's house, unloved by everyone except Mrs. Underwood, his master's wife. Seeking revenge for past humiliations, he instructs his djinn (genie) Bartimeus to steal a magic amulet from Simon Lovelace, the most powerful magician in London. Thus begins a Mission-Impossible type adventure to prevent Lovelace from recovering the amulet and using it in a grand, take-over-the-world type of evil scheme.If you have been resisting Bartimeus because it sounds like a Harry Potter wannabe, don't-read it now. Although the parallels are obvious--a world of magicians, an orphan apprentice battling a supreme evil--the author is not out to mimic Potter but to offer a different and more pessimistic vision of what a magical world would be like. In Harry Potter's world, magicial ability is a sort of genetic artifact; there are good, evil, and silly magicians - just as in the `human' world; and themes of the importance of family and friends predominate.Bartimeus' vision is much, much darker. Nathaniel lives in a world where magicians are a dominating ruling class, who thirst for wealth and power, and who will stop at nothing to get it. But all their power stems not from innate ability but from the ability to control the spirits (genies, imps, and the like) that populate the natural world. Here, the wizards are always on the edge of disaster created by losing control over these spirits. One word wrong in an incantation means disaster! There are no beneficent Dumbledore-like wizards here; all - and this includes Nathaniel - are driven by personal gain, revenge, and anger.For all its darkness, author Jonathan Stroud has crafted an extremely well-paced and exciting book. Get past the first 40 pages or so and you won't be able to put it down until you find out just what evil Lovelace is up to and whether Nathaniel will be able to stop him. The ending is deliciously ambiguous - not all the villains are captured; a mysterious Resistance seems to be forming among the non-magical humans; Nathaniel may succumb to his own lust for power; and the sarcastic and clever djinn Bartimeus seems likely to reappear in future volumes. As Bartimeus is the first volume of the "Amulet of Samarkand" trilogy, surely there is more excitement to come.Not, however, for people who thought that Harry Potter was dark or scary - if Harry disturbed you, this one will keep you checking under the bed at night and sleeping with the lights on.

clever, original, witty--highly recommended

As I've said in previous reviews, if you're going to set your book in England and have as a main character a young boy learning the art of wizardry, you've guaranteed yourself a comparison to Harry Potter. With The Amulet of Samarkand, Jonathan Stroud can proudly say, "bring him on--wands at 15 paces!". With so much pallid fantasy out there, Amulet is a breath of fresh air, told in a witty, original voice within a well-constructed plot and structure focused on two complex characters. Amulet is set in an alternate England ruled by magicians whose powers come from their ability to conjure demons. The society is beset within (by a resistance movement of "commoners" as well as by the murderous in-fighting among the ruling class magicians) and without (at war with Prague). Nathaniel is a young magician's apprentice who, after being publicly humiliated, seeks revenge via the demon Bartimaeus and a powerful talisman--the book's namepiece. By the time the book closes, it will involve murder and mayhem, betrayal, the attempted overthrow of the government, ancient (and I mean ancient) grievances, several tense chase scenes, various escape attempts, political commentary, the searing intensity of unassuagable guilt, and more. Despite all that is crammed in here, the plot moves along briskly for the most part (this despite its complexity and the use of footnotes). Nathaniel is a complex character, giving us easily as many reasons to dislike him as to sympathize with him. He is no paragon of heroism or innocence. The other and much more likable main character (or perhaps more accurately the true main character) is the demon Nathaniel summons and the trilogy's title character. Unlike Nathaniel, whose section is told in 3rd person, Bartimaeus gets to tell his section of the book himself, lending us a more intimate view and thus allowing us to empathize more directly with him. Even better, his is a wry, cynical voice, bitingly funny. He also has the advantage of centuries of experience to call upon for more material with which to sharpen his wit. His sections are simply a pleasure to read. He too is more complex than is typical in these works. For instance, a scene where he somewhat blithely is willing to kill three young teens with little remorse reminds us he is no tame funny pet for either Nathaniel or the reader. While Nathaniel's main antagonist, an evil wizard whose plots really aren't that out of character for magicians in general it turns out, is perhaps one of the weaker characters--a bit bland in both villainy and dialogue, the various demon antagonists of Bartimaeus are all wonderful creations, especially his two long-running nemeses whom he comes across several times. The structure moves back and forth skillfully between Bartimaeus's first person narration and the third-person description of what is happening with Nathaniel, pulling away from one to the other at just the right moments to create the greatest suspense. It is all de

A Mystifyingly Dark Book

Perhaps no novel will ever live up to Harry Potter but this one comes dangerously close. It's about a boy-Nathanial-who is a magician's apprentice. He's a very intelligent 5 year old boy who Arthur Underwood-a magician-takes reluctantly as his apprentice. Only Mrs. Underwood and his drawing teacher seem to like him.Nathanial (in a few years) starts to learn the arts and precision of magic-which is just basically summoning and containing demons-and learns it all eagerly. All goes well until he meets Simon Lovelace who embarrases Nathanial beyond reason in front of many magicians. After that all he has is revenge on his mind. He decides that his learning is going too slow for him to get his revenge and teaches himself magic through Mr. Underwood's books.He later summons the djinni Bartimaeus to aid him with his revenge. Bartimaeus adds the humor and brightens up this morbid story. His footnotes give you the insight you might need to understand some words-maybe not-and they are also very funny and are bound to make you roll on the floor with laughter...anyway...Bartinaeus is sent to retrieve the Amulet of Samarkand from Simon Lovelace. Bartimaeus returns after much persuit with the amulet and recieves a command to put the amulet away. Everything goes downhill from there.Where downhill does it go? I'll give you some hints...a demon/magician duel...spying...prison...and now that I have told you those, why don't you go read the book?

Refreshing new fantasy voice

Let's face it, fantasy is a well-worn genre, bloated with Tolkein ripoffs, tired generic plots and characters. There seems to be no end to the stuff...and no shortage of readers who'll swallow it. And to this we can add a new type of fantasy that is fast reaching critical mass for younger readers...the Harry Potter clone. Check the young readers section of your local bookstore and you'll find literally dozens of books about young boy and girl wizards. As the saying goes, everyone wants to be the first to do something second.There is nothing new in fantasy, only old wine in new bottles. So when a new fantasy comes along that actually feels new its a red letter day in my book.That rant is by way of saying that this wonderful book avoids the pitfalls of many fantasy writers simply by virtue of the writing. A few years back David (and Leigh) Eddings burst onto the fantasy scene with their original Belgariad books. Plot-wise they were simply Tolkein retreads without the epic mthology. But what made them so readable, and so popular, was the original and entertaining voice with which they told their tales.So it is with Jonathan Stroud. This is a fun, wry, funny, well-charactered piece about a modern London where magicians rule the land and magic comes in the form of controlling various levels of demons (or djinn). Set amidst the political intrigue is a story of a young apprentice magician's quest for revenge via the use of the some-time narrator djinn Bartimeus. He is the main reason to read the book. His amusing, ironic take on events is worth the price of admission alone. The world itself is well drawn and realised, as are all the characters.Yes there are shades of Harry Potter (a young apprentice wizard in a world of magic where commoners are virtually cattle) and various other genre books (Randall Garratt's Lord Darcy series spring to mind) but it's all done with such verve and charm that it quite rightly transcends its influences and becomes a classic in its own right.Buy it. Read it. You won't be disappointed. I look forward to the next chapters of this trilogy.