So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane – Review

If you want to do something dull and boring, get yourself a book like Bookkeeping For Dummies or Internal Combustion Engines For Idiots and learn yourself a trade. If, however, you love reading hugely entertaining, page-turning fantasy novels, and you have always wanted to be a wizard, then Diane Duane’s novel So You Want to Be a Wizard is the book for you! With a plot involving werewolf like creatures, called perytons, killer helicopters and cars with minds of their own, talking trees and a talking white hole, a possessive fireworm that’s dragon-sized, and–of course–wizards, this is a novel that you’re sure to enjoy.  It will make you want to read the rest of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of books, which is now at nine altogether.

It’s about thirteen-year-old Juanita (or Nita, as she’s usually referred to in the book) Callahan and her twelve-year-old friend, Kit. Both of them are bullied at school,and they form a bond of friendship when they discover they both are interested in becoming wizards so that they can learn magic that is practical and can protect them. They soon discover that language is very important, especially when reciting spells in the magical language of symbols the novel refers to as “Speech.” How we describe someone or something is how we define it, so we are in part responsible for creating what we perceive to be reality. This emphasis on language and the ways we shape our own reality, even without the use of magic, is one of the things I really liked about the novel.

Nita spots a strange book in the local library one day after school when she is being chased by Joanne Virella and some of Joanne’s friends, the main bullies from her school who torment her. She races into the library to use it as a refuge from her pursuers, and heads downstairs to the children’s section, while the librarian covers for her. On one shelf, she sees various So You Want to Be a…books, which are about careers like being a nurse, a scientist, or a pilot. A book in the series titled So You Want to Be a Wizard catches her eye, and she starts leafing through it. Nita thinks it’s got to be some sort of a joke, but she becomes fascinated by it and checks it out.

Two of the things Nita learns from the book are the numbers and symbols that make up the magical language known in the novel as “Speech” and the language of trees and other plants. She engages a crabapple tree behind her school in a conversation and the tree is ticked off that someone has disturbed its “art,” the pattern of leaves it’s laid down on the ground, to draw circles and other diagrams. The crabapple tells her another wizard did it, and explains to Nita that he is still close by. That’s when Nita meets up the Hispanic boy Kit, another young wizard-in-training, who becomes her friend.

Nita and Kit are aided by Fred, who is a white hole of immense mass like a black hole.  The white hole’s actual name is too difficult to pronounce, so Kit suggests the name of Fred. When asked where its mass is, since it seems to possess little, it tells Nita and Kit simply “Elsewhere.” They theorize that it’s possibly at the other end of a tunnel or warp in the fabric of space-time. The white hole comes to the kids in response to a spell they both cast, each speaking parts of it, combining the two things they want – Kit desires a power aura, to protect him from bullies, and Nita wants back a silver astronaut pen her uncle gave her which Joanne has stolen from her.  Carl and Tom are the two Advisory wizards Nita and Kit go to for advice on getting Nita’s pen out of Fred (who has accidentally swallowed it). The pen, though, is with most of Fred’s mass, “Elsewhere,” and Tom tells the two aspiring wizards the only way to retrieve the pen is to get Fred to hiccup it up, as he has hiccuped up other strange items he’s swallowed. 

To get him to hiccup up a specific item like the pen instead of ones randomly, Nita and Kit have to travel to the Grand Central worldgate in Manhattan. When they get there, they find that the old worldgate is temporarily under repairs, so they have to use a spell to solidify the air so they can step off of a skyscraper to the worldgate’s new location, over 70 floors up, in midair.  As they’re carefully walking towards the worldgate on a bridge of air, behind them, on the rooftop, perytons burst through a door and pursue them. They have little choice but to go through the worldgate, to escape the ravenous maddened perytons. I won’t go into great detail about the teens’s adventures on the other side of the worldgate, but I’ll mention that they find themselves in an dark, sunless, alternative universe Manhattan, ruled over by the evil person Fred knows of as the “”Starsnuffer,” because he has the power to darken stars.

Two books shape the destinies of their world, and all of the Universes: the Book of Night with Moon and its counterpart, the dark Book Which Is Not Named. The former has written in it literally everything about everything. All of reality is described in it, and every once in a while a wizard needs to recite parts of it out loud to renew the fabric of the Universe. The latter book describes everything dark and evil, and a person can get burned just from touching it. Reading from it can make evil wizards more powerful, if it doesn’t kill them. Diane Duane has written a book for adults, called The Book of Night with Moon, also, which is well worth reading.  Both of these books are hidden in the alternate Manhattan, where the Starsnuffer has them carefully guarded. He’s stolen the Book of Night With Moon, and he intends to make the Earth where Nita and Kit come from as evil and dark as the one he lives in. Nita and Kit decide they need to try to retrieve the Book of Night with Moon, but first they go after the one they believe to be probably less heavily guarded, the Book Which Is Not Named. There are rampaging packs of living taxi cabs roaming the streets, and it’s a dark world, with the Starsnuffer’s minions, the perytons, are also attempting to hunt them down.

Some reviews I’ve read of So You Want to Be a Wizard have criticized parts of it, like the packs of cabs, as not being all that realistic. Why attack other cars when you don’t really have the means to digest them, being a car yourself?  How can there be jaws and teeth at work, and how effective would they be against another of your own kind, also made of metal? Valid points, but I gave it a pass on these points, because–well, it’s a fantasy novel, and I had to compare it to other examples that people don’t seem too concerned about, like the Transformer franchise, about machines that attack other machines and have their own personalities. To each his/her own, but I liked reading this book, at any rate, despite/because of some of it’s more fanciful plot elements.

Originally published in 1983, it’s the first book in her “Young Wizards,” series, an awesome series of YA novels that anyone who likes reading books about magic, wizards, and alternate universes needs to include on his/her reading list, if you haven’t already read them. Diane Duane has also authored several Star Trek novels–I haven’t had the pleasure to read them yet, but I’ve heard they’re good, and I’d like to read them some day. I’ll be reviewing more novels in her “”Young Wizards,” series in the near future, so stay tuned!