“A Wizard of Mars” by Diane Duane

I was an incredibly intense fan of this series in middle school, aka the Young Wizards series. It has a very probable portrayal of magic and wizardry in the “real world” that relies on physics and makes sense spiritually. It’s a great mix of science fiction and fantasy, which is really cool. This book comes after “Wizards at War” in the series which I thought was the last one, BUT IT’S NOT I’M SO HAPPY!

As you can see from the title, it’s about Mars, our red neighbor, and what the wizards are doing up there. Nita and Kit are the wo main characters, and the teenage wizard partnership that continually gets into trouble and barely makes it out of adventures. Nita is trying to learn more about being a visionary and seeing the future, meanwhile Kit is obsessed with Mars and wants to learn more about it. Camela (Kit’s sister) is featured as she deciphers Mars text, and there’s more about Kit’s family as well since Helena comes home from college in the middle of everything, and she isn’t a fan of his wizardry talents. Nita’s family also has a side plot as Dairine starts learning about stars from Roshaun’s family in an attempt to find him. (Sorry this explanation is bad, but to explain Roshaun’s story would take all day, just read the earlier books.)

Some other characters from different books like Ronan, S’reee, and Darryl also make an appearance, which I always like when reading YA novels as some authors forget about other characters that they wrote about. Not Duane though, you can tell that she likes all of the people that she has created since they keep coming back and making appearances here and there.

Anyways so Nita and Kit’s relationship is the main focus here, they meet Martians that are very similar to them which makes Nita jealous and suspicious. You can probably guess where this is going…

The portrayal of Mars and how the planet is seen on Earth and how those affect the actual planet is interesting, wizardry in the books is about persuasion so what you think something is can be as important as what it actually is. It’s an interesting idea, open to ambiguity which science hardly ever is. It’s also very similar to theories within philosophy of language which says that the words we use for things kind of become the thing itself to us. You don’t need to know something concretely in in order to get a sense of it.

So this installment isn’t my favorite in the series since it is mostly about Nita and Kit’s relationship and I liked them as friends, and it’s mostly setting up for future installments but hey here we are. I guess takeaway here is to read the rest of the series because it’s really good!