Stroud, Jonathan. The Amulet of Samarkand

I have my ranty pants on.

You would think that a hugely popular fantasy brick by a former children's editor would have some redeeming qualities.

Well... the cover is shiny.

Nathaniel is a 12-year-old magician's apprentice in an alternate-world version of present-day London. (We know it's alternate because Czechoslovakia is a main world power--even though this has no effect on the story whatsoever...) The Parliament is made up of magicians, and one gets the impression that magicians are the only ones who hold any power; 'commoners' aren't even allowed to read. (So who does the magicians' taxes? Who edits their books? Who does doctoring and lawyering and nursing and social work and librarianship? Doesn't it make sense to outsource these things?) Aaaanyway, Nathaniel gets mad at another magician who humiliates him in public, and wants vengeance, and summons up a djinni to go steal the titular very powerful magical amulet. Lots of stuff happens, he gets wrapped up in a big conspiracy. Stuff blows up.

The classmate who told me I should read this (if only to know what kids these days are reading) warned me that it was dark. Okay. I do dark. I did a year of Japanese literature, and do you know how many suicides are involved in that? But darkness can be hedonistic, decadent, and fun. Or it can be a serious attempt to plumb the depths of human evil. A kid with a sense of entitlement who throws a tantrum and summons a 'demon,' but who never has to confront the consequences in any way that feels real, is just the stupid kind of dark. It IS a book that's dark and bleak... in the whole thing there is one relationship with the slightest affection, one genuinely altruistic action. Most of the people really don't like each other very much, and Nathaniel himself isn't very likeable, and the demon Bartimeus is slightly better because he's somewhat witty, but really not by a whole lot. That works okay in some literary works, because they want to know about real cruelty and sorrow and the small unkindnesses we perpetrate upon each other without really wanting to. This book mostly wants to blow things up.

Oh, and this is forgivable--I will admit, I loved Kill Bill, and not because it had profound things to say about the human condition. People got sliced up really good, is all. But Amulet is limply written and without style, going from one life-or-death emergency to the other without a moment to pause, reflect, scaffold the plot and give it a sense of meaning and direction.

It doesn't matter if you think they're going to die, unless you actually care whether they do or not. (Also: 460 pages? 460 pages is a LOT for a book that doesn't really go anywhere).

Maybe I'm missing something, because the cover blurbs say that the NYT Book Review, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist all loved it. And I can see what it has going for it (besides a shiny cover); there's a fair bit of Cool Stuff, and action, and adventure, and those certainly have their attractions. But I don't like the people in this book, I don't care about them, and I find it kind of odd that an editor wouldn't know better than to foist this stuff on people. (Maybe he knew it would sell really well)