Nathaniel is eleven, apprenticed to a mediocre magician, humiliated in public by a more powerful one, and decides — as eleven-year-olds with access to demon-summoning apparently do — that the correct response is theft and revenge, in that order. He summons Bartimaeus, a djinni with five thousand years of grudges and footnotes, and sends him to steal the Amulet of Samarkand from the man who wronged him. It goes about as well as you'd expect, which is to say: badly, entertainingly, and with escalating consequences.

Two narrators, one much funnier

The book splits its narration between Nathaniel's earnest, humorless third person and Bartimaeus's first-person present tense, complete with footnotes that run for entire paragraphs on demonic history, prior humiliations of past masters, and pointed asides about the smell of London sewers across several centuries. I will be honest: I read this book for Bartimaeus and tolerated Nathaniel, and I don't think I'm alone in that, but the split serves a purpose the jokes almost hide.

The demon gets all the good lines. The boy gets to be right about everything, which is worse.— Prakhar Gautam

Because underneath the wit is a genuinely unpleasant magic system: magicians in this London do not have power of their own, they have power over enslaved spirits, and the entire ruling class is built on a supply chain of coerced servitude that the humans in charge do not think about and the demons cannot stop resenting. Nathaniel's story is a magician's story. Bartimaeus's footnotes are the underclass talking back, and the book trusts you to notice the gap between the two registers without ever stopping to explain it.

The plot itself, once the amulet is stolen, turns into a fairly propulsive conspiracy involving a magician far more dangerous than the one who started this, and the back half moves considerably faster than the setup. Stroud is unafraid to let genuinely bad things happen to characters the book has made you fond of, which raised my opinion of it considerably around the two-thirds mark.