Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"The temperature of the room dropped fast. Ice formed on the curtains and crusted thickly around the lights in the ceiling. The glowing filaments in each bulb shrank and dimmed, while the candles that sprang from every available surface like a colony of toadstools had their wicks snuffed out. The darkened room filled with a yellow, choking cloud of brimstone, in which indistinct black shadows writhed and roiled. From far away came the sound of many voices screaming. Pressure was suddenly applied to the door that led to the landing. It bulged inward, the timbers groaning. Footsteps from invisible feet came pattering across the floorboards and invisible mouths whispered wicked things from behind the bed and under the desk.
"The sulfur cloud contracted into a thick column of smoke that vomited forth thin tendrils; they licked the air like tongues before withdrawing. The column hung above the middle of the pentacle, bubbling ever upward against the ceiling like the cloud of an erupting volcano. There was a barely perceptible pause. Then two yellow staring eyes materialized in the heart of the smoke.
"Hey, it was his first time. I wanted to scare him."

Meet Bartimaeus, a powerful djinni who is capable of adopting thousands of visible guises, observing things on seven different planes, and who enjoys dropping the names of (and telling anecdotes about) the famous people he has served over the course of many millennia. He is the title character of a new trilogy being written by British author Jonathan Stroud.

Bartimaeus has been summoned by Nathaniel, a somewhat slight twelve-year-old who was sold at a tender age into a magician's apprenticeship. Nathaniel has been raised by that clueless and mediocre magician, Arthur Underwood, who serves in the British government's Ministry of Internal Affairs, and by Underwood's wife, who is loving and maternal toward the apprentice, while seemingly quite blind to her husband's shortcomings--particularly his harsh manner of relationship with the boy.

Having been summoned by Nathaniel, Bartimaeus waits for his orders:

"The kid cleared his throat. This was the moment. This was what he'd been building up to. He'd been dreaming of this for years, when he should have been lying on his bed thinking about racing cars or girls. I waited grimly for the request. What would it be? Levitating some object was a usual one, or moving it from one side of the room to the other. Perhaps he'd want me to conjure an illusion. That might be fun: there was bound to be a way of misinterpreting his request and upsetting him.
" 'I charge you to retrieve the Amulet of Samarkand from the house of Simon Lovelace and bring it to me when I summon you at dawn tomorrow.'
" 'You what?'
" 'I charge you to retrieve--'
" 'Yes, I heard what you said.' I didn't mean to sound petulant. It just slipped out, and my sepulchral tones slipped a bit too."

At first underestimating the boy--as so many characters do throughout the book--Bartimaeus assumes Nathaniel is being manipulated by some "real" magician to snatch the powerful charm. But unknown to all, Nathaniel is a brilliant apprentice with a razor sharp memory who has self-taught himself by devouring book after book in his master's library. Underwood's continuing attitude--that Nathaniel is worthless and untrainable--fuels the boy's quiet and tenacious determination to develop himself into an exceptional magician and eventually fulfill his aspirations of growing up to serve in Parliament.

Bartimaeus has been summoned by the boy because Nathaniel is also determined to take revenge for the humiliating fashion in which he has been treated in the past by a group of Underwood's cohorts, led by the power-hungry Lovelace. It turns out that Simon Lovelace has acquired the Amulet in question through a deadly scheme. When Bartimaeus obeys his young master command and succeeds in gaining the Amulet, Lovelace is willing to do anything necessary to insure the charm's return.

The unusual relationship that develops between Bartimaeus and Nathaniel winds its way through the 460 pages of this wild, action-filled tale. That relationship is both adversarial and interdependent, and involves gradually increasing levels of mutual respect.

And, as you might have inferred, Bartimaeus has quite a wit. The author utilizes frequent footnotes to allow the djinni to provide explanations and historic tidbits, as well as share his many sarcastic asides (à la Groucho Marx).

Last year, Scholastic's Chicken Run division used the annual festivities of the Association of Booksellers for Children (which lead into the Book Expo weekend) as a launching pad for introducing THE THIEF LORD, a book which went on to become one of best-selling children's books of 2002 and was just voted a BookSense Book of the Year. Following in those footsteps, Hyperion and Miramax utilized this year's ABC festivities--and the rest of this past weekend's Book Expo in L.A.--to enthusiastically promote THE AMULET OF SAMARKAND. The stacks of advance copies were accompanied by the author's appearance at the Convention Center. Stroud, who, like his character, lives amid the outskirts of London, is currently balancing obligations to promote this first book with the need to keep an eye on his approaching January deadline for submitting the second manuscript. Miramax has spent a substantial sum for the movie rights to the trilogy, and after devouring the first book, it sure seems like a great investment.

"The first grudging rays flickered in the eastern sky. A halo of light slowly emerged over the Docklands horizon. I cheered it on. It couldn't come fast enough.
"The whole night had been a wearisome and often humiliating business. I had repeatedly lurked, loitered, and fled, in that order, through half the postal districts of London. I had been manhandled by a thirteen-year-old girl. I had taken shelter in a bin. And now, to cap it all, I was crouching on the roof of Westminister Abbey, pretending to be a gargoyle. Things don't get much worse than that."

I carried this book around the show with me all weekend, taking full advantage of any and all free moments to read another chapter of our heroes matching wits, wills, imps, and illusions against the bad guys. Oftentimes, traipsing through Stroud's complicated world, I was in total awe: It was like watching someone use a truckload of paper clips to build a life-size model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and you're just waiting for it to fall apart--but it all just keeps holding together...like magic.

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com