The Amulet of Samarkand

 

I happen to be at the Chennai airport waiting to board the flight to Colombo, and S decides to pick up something to read. I accompany him, severely deciding not to buy anything for myself, after all I have my vacation. reading already aligned.

But I have this thing พระเครื่อง. If I visit one, I can't leave without picking up something! I felt guilty for indulging myself, so I took this book with half my heart. I read it in a day and a half and absolutely LOVED it!

I had long intended to read a fantasy book. I have this sudden love of magic, blood, and mysticism that this genre offers. Jonathan Stroud's 'The Amulet of Samarkand' did not disappoint.

The first of the Bartimaeus trilogy, this is the story of Nathaniel, a young, up-close, emotional and extremely reckless apprentice-magician and the djinni Bartimaeus that he summons.

Nathaniel lives with his master and his lover and is bitter about his master's attitude towards him. The excitement is strengthened when Simon Lovelace (a minister-magician whose ambition is to take over the government and will stop at nothing to achieve it) despises him as a mere child. An angry Nathaniel summons Bartimaeus, a 5,000-year-old djinni, to seek his revenge.

The Amulet of Samarkand is a fast-paced, action-packed story with hilarious and witty footnotes (in fact, I sometimes had to put down my book because I was laughing so much). Jonathan Stroud moves from the second-person narration of Nathaniel's story to the first-person narration of Bartimaeus with graceful ease.