booksthatburn's Reviews (1.46k)

I dislike the narrator and the tone.

I loved this whole thing. It's paced excellently, tells a great story, and is in a world conveyed succinctly. If you like queer fantasy/mystery  novellas with life and death stakes, try this. 

I realized I don't care about this series anymore.

Bartimaeus is a djinni, enslaved by apprentice magician Nathaniel for the purpose of revenge against a magician who bullied him. When it turns out that the titular amulet is more than just a valuable possession, Nathaniel and Bartimaeus find themselves tangled in a plot against the government itself.

The worldbuilding makes it clear that magicians have been around for a very long time, with Nathaniel’s home of London being merely the most recent epicenter of magic and magical power. It shows the classism and social stratification which is fueled and perpetuated by magicians through their enslavement of summoned entities. It’s also a system which relies on controlling and conditioning children to think of being a magician and growing up to serve the British government as the only good and worthwhile way to exist, fostering a deep loathing and contempt for commoners (non-magicians). Bartimaeus never lets it be forgotten that his very corporeal existence is an unwanted and physically painful condition of his slavery, that as much as he may or may not develop a rapport with Nathaniel, their relationship is an inherently unequal one which is predicated on Nathaniel summoning Bartimaeus against his will. He's is a witty and engaging narrator, with timely asides to explain various worldbuilding details in a sardonic manner. The narrative alternates between Bartimaeus’s commentary and a third-person view of Nathaniel’s perspective in the past and present.  

This is a solid start to the trilogy, setting up things which the later books will build upon.

I was initially drawn in by the premise, a group of magicians brought to the Library of Alexandria have a year to decide which one of them will be eliminated and which five get to stay for another year. The cast of characters is pretty diverse (though a bit of that initial feeling of diversity was dampened when I realized all of them seemed to have English as their first language, which instantly shrunk the practical candidate pool. Part of the story questions the validity and methods of the entire enterprise, so that leaves some wiggle room for explaining why the candidates aren't actually very diverse (only six total, and two are from the same school in the USA?). Additionally, this could have been the library of Atlantis or Boston and it would have had just as much relevance to the plot. The latest incarnation of the "Library of Alexandria" is physically located in London, in the UK. It became clear pretty quickly that "Alexandria" is just a name, and an indication of thousands of years of whatever this thing is (or at least a claim to that long legacy). There are vague descriptions of the category of study and experiments which the candidates are pursuing, but most of the story is actually a very intense and complicated web of power plays and personal dynamics between the six candidates and the two Alexandrians who oversee them (mostly one of them). There's a pretty intense sex scene about halfway through which I actually didn't mind, but it felt like a sudden shift in tone from the rest of the book. 

The characters seemed initially pretty interesting, but there's very little description of how their powers actually work. There are discussions of magical theory which I enjoyed, but they were usually couched in ways where the magic is actually secondary, which made them feel unmoored from the world being built. 

It's six (sometimes eight) people in a house, talking to each other and slowly changing how they feel about one another, which is not what I was expecting in a book about "magicians living in the Library of Alexandria".

Ultimately I stopped because it became clearly stated that the whole thing is a slow burn trolley problem, and I don't like trolley problem situations.

I remember liking this in high school but I think my tastes have changed significantly since then. There's a lot of ableism (internal and external) as Fitz navigates the new state of his body after the events of last book. I don't like how his early epiphany about how his body still can do things amounts to "at least I'm disabled, not elderly", which is extremely frustrating.

I liked this when I was a teenager, but some stuff hasn't aged well and I'm not interested anymore.

BREAKABLE THINGS is a poignant and visceral collection of stories which end poised on the cusp of something fantastic or terrible, as raw as new grief, haunting like ghosts. 

Each story is set in its own world, built from nothing in a few pages and immediately compelling. The main characters rarely have names, their essences are distinct and wonderous without the need for tiny labels. Their stories spill forth as their insides are offered up, with literal and metaphorical viscera pouring out, flayed flesh as common as emotions laid bare.

"Don’t Turn on The Lights" is a strong start to the collection, with an inexorable slide from a bloody and spooky story into something stranger and more horrifying than simple, gory, murder in the dark. My favorite two are "A Leash of Foxes, Their Stories Like Barter" and "Monologue of an unnamed mage, recorded at the brink of the end", but I like every story in the collection. "In the Rustle of Pages" will stay with me for a while, I think.

MASTIFF follows Baka, Tunstall, Farmer Cape, and Lady Sabine in their hunt for a kidnapped prince. They quickly discover that his kidnappers used the slave trade to fund and disguise their movements and make the plan possible, in addition to trafficking the prince himself just as any other child slave in Tortall. 

It shows Beka’s partnership with Tunstall, something set up at the end of Terrier. There’s a new storyline related to the kidnapped child they’re tracking. This answers the reason why Tortall has slavery in Beka’s time but not by the time Alanna is born in the Song of the Lioness quartet. Several things are introduced and resolved, including but not limited to the kidnapping and the conspiracy at the center of it.

Most of the book covers the long and difficult (but mostly long) journey on the trail of the prince and the minutiae of the hunt. Along the way Beka gets to know Farmer, the mage in their group. Tunstall’s Lady Sabine is there to be a sword and to ease their way among the nobles in their path. Beka and Tunstall are their with Beka’s scent hoond, Achoo, making the hunt possible. I like most of the individual scenes, but together they just take a very long time on the trail of the prince. I also find the plot about Beka’s recently deceased fiancé to be pointless and frustrating. Because the story so immediately leaves Corus, most of the people who knew about the relationship are left behind right away, and any reference to how much better Farmer is to be around than the fiancé just feels odd because we didn’t see the toxic and slowly breaking relationship that just ended. It’s fine for Beka to have had a life in the three years between books, but this weird halfway where the fiancé isn’t around in TERRIER or BLOODHOUND and dead at the start of Mastiff makes it feel unmoored and pointless. I do love Farmer, he’s a great addition to the series and I just wish he’d appeared earlier.

This book might mostly make sense if someone started here and hadn’t read any of the other books, but it would definitely dampen the impact of several developments. Beka’s still the narrator (except for the epilogue), as this is her journal. MASTIFF has a pretty devastating betrayal which makes it difficult to discuss the story without spoilers. I hated this event when I first read the book, but upon re-reading the trilogy I can see the elements leading to it much further off and it makes more sense to me now. It still feels like the casual destruction of a good character, but in an actually understandable manner. This concludes Beka’s writings of her story, the journal format means she can say specifically that she doesn’t intend to keep a journal anymore after these events.