Saturday, 13 February 2021 08:23 pm
Book Review: So You Want to Be a Wizard
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deckardcanineThis very title tempted me. Heck, even the author name, Diane Duane, kinda did. And its young adult designation is no turnoff for a man like me. The one stumbling block was that the back cover and front-page excerpt tell us exceedingly little about the plot -- only that modern Juanita Campbell accidentally discovers a book (yes, by the same title) that enables her to do real magic.
No need for an academy like Hogwarts; it's all there in the ever-changing manual, and a bookworm like "Nita" will absorb a whole lot of information before ever casting a spell. It also helps with networking, which especially matters in the pre-Web setting of 1983. Soon she finds that certain fellow neighborhood outcasts are also certified wizards, one of them a novice close to her 13 years of age: Christopher "Kit" Rodriguez. (Guess Duane likes half-Hispanic characters.) No, they don't have a budding romance in this first volume of the Young Wizards series; they're too busy with serious tasks even for idle chatter.
OK, Nita's initial aim doesn't seem all that serious: A female physical bully of a persuasion I'd sooner expect of boys against boys steals her space pen, and Nita wants to get it back pacifistically. But the manual says magic is for combating universal entropy as long as possible, so I doubt veteran wizards would approve of such a trivial use. Nevertheless, it's a good thing that she and Kit work on this, because in the process, they discover a threat to the universe, with no time to enlist any further help.
Well, that last detail is a little misleading. While there are very few human characters with important roles, one of the first tricks wizards learn is how to understand and communicate with things that don't speak in the tongues of humans -- even things we don't consider remotely alive, such as rocks, which rather perturbs me. For some reason, Nita does better than Kit with plants, and he does better with machines. Their most constant companion is an unexpectedly summoned white hole, appearing as a tiny floating light, whom they call Fred, because it comes close to a syllable of his super-long given name. Fred provides the bulk of the comic relief, between his extreme ignorance of Earth ways and his tendency to produce random objects, but his part of the story is ultimately dramatic.
As luck would have it, there's about as much focus on New York City here as in my last read. About half the plot takes place in some alternate version that is no place for humans to live. Pretty scary even to adult readers sometimes.
The main villain is called by a few titles rather than a proper name, and the good guys would just as soon not call him anything. He sounds a lot like the devil himself, even conversing with a hostile high power named Michael, implied to be the archangel. That said, he's not in the business of capturing souls so much as reshaping what he doesn't annihilate. Perhaps he's more like the Unmaker, an entity arguably worse than the devil, from Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker. Regardless, I don't take his inclusion as preachy like in a C.S. Lewis tale.
This is one fantasy in which wizardry does not sound like fun. It's hard work, even with a partner, and the more powerful stuff calls for a sacrifice of some sort. The manual warns that many walk away from it, and Nita considers doing so after her first adventure. But that would be like me leaving behind all my neuropsychological quirks: They're too big a part of me, and I'd feel suddenly blander without them.
I hope the series gets into more of the social aspects of the secret world of wizards. I am intrigued, for example, that they don't deal in cash as much as favors. Whatever the case, the sneak preview at the end of this book promises a new setting, and I trust the immediate sequel not to feel like a retread.
In keeping with my earlier stated desire not to wait too long for another Discworld read, my next novel is Thief of Time. It's off to a confusing start.
No need for an academy like Hogwarts; it's all there in the ever-changing manual, and a bookworm like "Nita" will absorb a whole lot of information before ever casting a spell. It also helps with networking, which especially matters in the pre-Web setting of 1983. Soon she finds that certain fellow neighborhood outcasts are also certified wizards, one of them a novice close to her 13 years of age: Christopher "Kit" Rodriguez. (Guess Duane likes half-Hispanic characters.) No, they don't have a budding romance in this first volume of the Young Wizards series; they're too busy with serious tasks even for idle chatter.
OK, Nita's initial aim doesn't seem all that serious: A female physical bully of a persuasion I'd sooner expect of boys against boys steals her space pen, and Nita wants to get it back pacifistically. But the manual says magic is for combating universal entropy as long as possible, so I doubt veteran wizards would approve of such a trivial use. Nevertheless, it's a good thing that she and Kit work on this, because in the process, they discover a threat to the universe, with no time to enlist any further help.
Well, that last detail is a little misleading. While there are very few human characters with important roles, one of the first tricks wizards learn is how to understand and communicate with things that don't speak in the tongues of humans -- even things we don't consider remotely alive, such as rocks, which rather perturbs me. For some reason, Nita does better than Kit with plants, and he does better with machines. Their most constant companion is an unexpectedly summoned white hole, appearing as a tiny floating light, whom they call Fred, because it comes close to a syllable of his super-long given name. Fred provides the bulk of the comic relief, between his extreme ignorance of Earth ways and his tendency to produce random objects, but his part of the story is ultimately dramatic.
As luck would have it, there's about as much focus on New York City here as in my last read. About half the plot takes place in some alternate version that is no place for humans to live. Pretty scary even to adult readers sometimes.
The main villain is called by a few titles rather than a proper name, and the good guys would just as soon not call him anything. He sounds a lot like the devil himself, even conversing with a hostile high power named Michael, implied to be the archangel. That said, he's not in the business of capturing souls so much as reshaping what he doesn't annihilate. Perhaps he's more like the Unmaker, an entity arguably worse than the devil, from Orson Scott Card's The Tales of Alvin Maker. Regardless, I don't take his inclusion as preachy like in a C.S. Lewis tale.
This is one fantasy in which wizardry does not sound like fun. It's hard work, even with a partner, and the more powerful stuff calls for a sacrifice of some sort. The manual warns that many walk away from it, and Nita considers doing so after her first adventure. But that would be like me leaving behind all my neuropsychological quirks: They're too big a part of me, and I'd feel suddenly blander without them.
I hope the series gets into more of the social aspects of the secret world of wizards. I am intrigued, for example, that they don't deal in cash as much as favors. Whatever the case, the sneak preview at the end of this book promises a new setting, and I trust the immediate sequel not to feel like a retread.
In keeping with my earlier stated desire not to wait too long for another Discworld read, my next novel is Thief of Time. It's off to a confusing start.