Wow.

The drama. The heart-wrenching. The action. The moral compromises. The traitor-revealing. The sinister plots. The heroics. The ironic humor. (The footnotes?) This one’s got it all.

I loved this book — an excellent ending (I was worried after the last one, but I’m okay now)–I couldn’t put it down. And it had nothing to do with M pestering me: are you done yet?? (She went back and re-read the second one and finished it before I was done with this one….impatient girl, sometimes.) It was a gripping, engaging read. Suspenseful, funny, resourceful (go Kitty!) and redemptive.

Yet.

I’m trying to process the ending. I “get” it — the parallels between Bartimaeus and Nathaniel and Bartimaeus and Ptolemy, and the self-sacrificing… but I’m not satisfied by it. I wanted something more. Closure. A happier ending. Something less noble? That’s not to say I wish Stroud had written a different ending. I don’t. It’s just going to take some discussion and thinking and processing to figure it out.

Perhaps that’s a hallmark of a truly great book.

That’s the last one for the From the Stacks challenge. Go figure; I managed to read my entire list. (I was a bit concerned about it for a while there.) Now on to read more for my own challenge….