** spoiler alert ** What a pleasant surprise.

I found this book better than The Amulet of Samarkand. Stroud has avoided the trap of overengineering the world he has created, and concentrated on his characters instead. And that worked really well. Bartimaeus got some depth, Kitty got some personality, and Nathaniel... Nathaniel (IMO) got purposefully degraded to a background character. I like how his position in the world contrasts with Bartimaeus remarks from first book. Nathaniel has become all of the things he has loathed in his old master - and more. He's still trying to come back to his innocent time - but without much success. I think it has given the book very needed depth and realism - it isn't the sweet dreamy world of Harry Potter, reality bites :)

If there's one thing that I don't like about the book, it's the scarcity of details about the world. There's more of those than in first book of the cycle, but some parts could use better descriptions. We roughly know the layout and composition of major forces in Stroud's world, but we can only guess on what's the level of technological development. With world full of obedient servants, there might have not been big push for developing some machines, or pursuing some ideas...

This way or another, I've greatly enjoyed the book, and I'll definitely read third part of the cycle.