A strong finish to this series about magical oppression.

Worth slogging through book two just to get to this one. (And I’m still not convinced my reaction to that book wasn’t just me trying to read it at the wrong time.)

This is the third and final book in the original Bartimaeus Trilogy (he wrote a prequel in 2010 but I think I’m going to pass on that one). It takes place three years after the events of The Golem’s Eye. Nathaniel/John Mandrake is high up in government now, in charge of what is essentially the propaganda department, and is currently preoccupied with sniffing out spies and resistance members, as well as making the war in the American colonies palatable to an ever more unhappy public. He is miserable. He dismissed Bartimaeus at the end of the last book, but apparently had been calling on him for greater and greater intervals ever since, and it has now been a very long time since Bartimaeus was allowed to visit the Other Place. This means he is weak and vulnerable, but Nathaniel stubbornly refuses to dismiss him, out of some secret fear, presumably.

Our third protagonist, Kitty, has been busy these last three years getting an informal education in magic and magical history from a disaffected magician. Something about her meeting with Bartimaeus three years before struck her, and she’s been tracking down information about his past. In particular, she’s curious about his preferred form of the young boy, a former master. What kind of djinni would take on the form of someone who enslaved them?

Not going further into detail about what actually happens here because it’s really satisfying to be surprised by it, but I was pleased with how all three of our main characters ended up, and pleased with the overall trajectory of the series. Stroud set up a lot of pins to be knocked down in books one and two, and I was worried he wouldn’t be able to realistically deal with them all, but he somehow manages it.

If you like fantasy, I’d highly recommend checking this series out. The themes and plots it works with are not the ones we typically see anymore in children’s or middle grade or YA fantasy. There’s a refreshing lack of a love story, the most sympathetic character is not the human, and the white male is not the unexamined savior of the world. The focus on the alternate history of it all was fun as well. I overall really enjoyed it and can see myself revisiting in a couple of years (though I think I might do it by audio–my editions have such small print; this is how I know I’m getting old).