[Magic] Bartimaeus: The Ring Of Solomon by Jonathan Stroud

”The rules between my masters and myself are clear: the magician forces me to help him get wealth and power, and I do my best to nobble him.”

Bartimaeus, the djinni with attitude, is back.

The inimitably insolent Bartimaeus has returned – as a slave to King Solomon, wielder of the all-powerful Ring. Until a girl assassin shows up with more than just murder on her mind and things start to get ... interesting.



In this prequel to the bestselling BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY the djinni is working (against his will) for a magician to King Solomon – a ruler feared and respected as much for his all-powerful Ring as for his own wisdom. Despite all his cunning, sarcasm and general trickery, Bartimaeus is unable to escape his confinement until he meets Asmira, a young Sheban woman who’s at Solomon’s court to carry out a dangerous mission for her queen. Together, she and Bartimaeus find themselves plunged into the ambitious and cut throat world of court politics and will have to rely on each other to survive.

Bartimaeus is one of the best characters in children’s fiction: sarcastic, cheeky, self-important and arrogant, he’s a huge amount of fun whenever he’s on the page. I worried this would read like a cash-in unnecessary prequel, but by and large it works well, with Stroud controlling his plot and characters with panache. If you’re new to Bartimaeus then this is a good introduction to his world, with Stroud reprising his explanation of how magic works in this world, the different types of magical creature used and the relationship between magicians and their slaves.

Bartimaeus’s attempts to escape his magician controllers are hilarious and the snarky footnotes that give background on characters and situations are a lot of fun. Asmira reminded me a little of Kitty and Nathaniel from the BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY in that Stroud uses her to ask questions about individuality, slavery and control, which gave me déjà vu. However her personal journey is well depicted and Stroud is subtle in showing how she changes and portraying her doubts as her certainties are challenged.

As a villain, Khaba is slightly bland – ambitious to the point of being power mad, his background isn’t fully sketched out and the relationship between him and his own magical servant is tantalisingly hinted at without being fully drawn. This is a shame because Stroud is doing something new there and Bartimaeus’s reaction to that is fascinating. Similarly Solomon himself is a cipher who doesn’t get much page time until the final quarter and even then doesn’t make a huge impression in his own right.

For all that though, Bartimaeus’s own charm carries the reader through this book and that, combined with the terrific pacing and bags of plot, makes it well worth a few hours of any child’s (or parent’s) time.

The Verdict:

Bartimaeus is back in a prequel to the bestselling BARTIMAEUS TRILOGY that is well worth a few hours of your time. Funny, sharp, fast paced and jam packed with plot, while there is a slight sense of déjà vu in terms of the themes explored, it is nevertheless a delight from beginning to end and a book that 9 – 12 year olds should thoroughly enjoy. If you’re completely new to the character, then it’s probably worthwhile starting here rather than with the Trilogy as it will give you a better idea of what to expect.

BARTIMAEUS: THE RING OF SOLOMON was published in the UK on 14th October. Thanks to the Amazon UK Vine Programme for the ARC.

[Magic] Trick Reveal Suprising Result - Autism

Magic tricks reveal surprising results about autism

[Magic] Magicians rely on misdirection—drawing attention to one place while they're carrying out their tricky business somewhere else. It seems like people with autism should be less susceptible to such social manipulation. But a new study in the U.K. finds that people with autism spectrum disorder are actually more likely to be taken in by the vanishing ball trick, where a magician pretends to throw a ball in the air but actually hides it in his hand

In the vanishing-ball illusion, a magician throws a ball in the air a few times. On the last throw, he merely pretends to throw it, making a tossing motion and looking upwards while the ball remains concealed in his hand. But observers claim to "see" the ball leaving the hand. This misdirection depends on social cues; the audience watches the magician's face. People with autism are known for having trouble interpreting social cues, so Gustav Kuhn of Brunel University and his coauthors Anastasia Kourkoulou and Susan R. Leekam of Cardiff University thought they could use magic tricks to understand how people with autism function.

For this experiment, 15 teenagers and young adults with autism spectrum disorder and 16 without autism watched a video of a magician performing the vanishing-ball illusion. Then they were asked to mark where they last saw the ball on a still image of the magician. The last place it appeared was in the magician's hand, but many people mark a position higher up and say that he threw the ball. "We strongly suspected that individuals with autism should be using the social cues less than typically developing individuals," says Kuhn—that people with autism would watch the ball rather than the magician's face, and thus have a better idea of what happened.
But the exact opposite happened. People with autism were much more likely to think the magician had thrown the ball. Kuhn speculates that this is because the people in the study were all students at a special college for autism, where they would have been taught to use social cues. When he examined where their eyes had looked, he found that, like normally-developing people, they looked first at the magician's face—but their eyes took longer to fix there. They also had more trouble fixing their eyes on the ball. The results are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"What we suggest is that individuals with autism have particular problems in allocating attention to the right place at the right time," Kuhn says. This may cause trouble in social situations, when you have to be able to pay attention to the right thing at the right time. Kuhn would like to repeat the experiment in children with autism, who may not yet have been educated in social cues, to see if they are also taken in by the illusion.

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