Hello there Mr. Jonothan Stroud. Wow, I sound like a little girl adrressing the Prime minister or something. I just finished reading the trilogy and first of all would like to be a very big suck up and say that they were amazing. And I actually mean it. they have earned a space on my book shelf (which is not easy as it is reserved for my absolute favorites). Well, I had better get down to bussines.

Question 1: Would magicians eventually develop resilience? As you know (Of course you would, you wrote it!), commoners are being born with resilience which leaves them protected from magic to some degree. But, if magicians are commoners who are sold to be magicians at an early age, would some magicians not be blessed with resilience? It has been praying on my mind for a long time but I could never come up with a solution. perhaps you could help me in my search for the answer?

Question 2: Recently I reccomended TAOS to a friend. While in the school library, she ask me what gender Barti was. I tried to explain that he was genderless but found myself always encorperating little pronouns, mostly "he", into my explaination. Then, after skimming back through GE, I realised that Barti was always described as male. Is he male or does he just prefur to refur to himself as "he" because it is what he feels most comfortable in? There I go again with the pronouns...Can you shed some light?

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I think it is really great that you take the time out of your busy (Or for all I know incredibly lazy - im not judging really, I have no idea what you do when you're not writing!) schedule to awnser these questions. Good luck with your future projects.

Georgina, age 13

Hi Georgina,

Thanks very much for your questions and I'm sorry to be so slow replying. Hope the books haven't been hurled off your shelf...

1. This is a great question and it did occur to me too, when I was writing PG. The implications were REALLY interesting, and for a while I wondered whether I should explore it, but it wasn't part of the original plot, so I ended up ignoring it! The answer is Yes, a magician is nothing but an ordinary person, really, so it makes absolute sense that sooner or later a magician with resilience would be born. The nearest we get to it in the trilogy I suppose is the Mercenary, who has high resilience and uses it for bad ends, but what if Nat had had it... A magician with resilience would be powerful indeed. Who knows, I may come back to that if I ever do another Bart book....

2. Everything about Bart's guises are artificial on one level, including his gender, but like all other djinn he tends to return to what 'fits' him best, what makes him feel comfortable. It seems that male characters, a male persona, are what suits him. I suppose it boils down to the fact that he has a 'male voice': that's what remains constant with him and right from the start there was no question that I perceived that voice as male. But originally, when he was back in the OP, as part of the swirling essence, he was neither one thing nor the other.

Back to my schedule, lazy or otherwise...

Best wishes,

Jonathan