“Games Wizards Play” by Diane Duane

This is a series that I hadn’t picked up in a while. I think I wrote about an earlier installment in this saga a while ago, but I haven’t touched anything by Duane since then. I don’t remember being thrilled with it, but this one made me remember just how much I love the series all over again. It made me strangely nostalgic for high school, seeing the close knit community that the characters have and how close they are with their families. And my high school experience was nothing like that!

This book centers around peacetime for the Wizards, or as peaceful as you can get. Every eleven years there’s a competition for young wizards, with only slightly older ones serving as their mentors. The idea is that you’ll learn more from someone close to your age. Nita, Kit, and Dairine all are nominated to serve as mentors to the next generation as they design spells and submit them to a competition. The winner works with the Planetary wizard for a year, which is quite the award since she’s the most powerful wizard on Earth.

What really struck me during this book was the intense amount of world building that Duane has done. To observe the competition, characters from all over come by, and they each reveal something new about themselves. Even characters that are mentioned in passing are usually revealed to be working on something new and exciting since the last time we saw them. And the main characters are continually having flashbacks to earlier memories that are so stunningly consistent with the way that I remember them. Of course, Duane has been doing this throughout the series, introducing something in passing in one book that then gets fleshed out in a later installment. It just never ceases to amaze me just how much information she has about this alternate reality that she has created.

There is also a greater amount of diversity introduced in this book. This series has always been diverse, with characters from different planets mentioned as much as people with different backgrounds, but this one seems to do that more than usual with its focus on Earth. Dairine’s mentee is Islamic, and Nita and Kit’s mentee is Chinese. One of the recurring characters is revealed to be gay, while another one is shown to be asexual. (Sidenote: as an asexual I appreciate this incredibly, representation matters to me so much. This character in particular is wonderful, one of her opening lines clarifies that it isn’t that she can’t have sex or hasn’t has sex, it’s that she doesn’t. And she very clearly isn’t aromantic as well, which is something that people easily confuse asexuality for. I love her and I love this.) The Planetary wizard for Earth has always been described as a woman with a baby at her hip, but the baby’s character is expanded on in this book, and revealed to have had leukemia. Imagine that: the most powerful wizard on Earth is a working mother with a sick baby! That’s incredible!

Duane is doing amazing things with the fantasy genre. We knew that from the beginning since Nita has always very firmly been the (female) main character, with relatable thoughts and ideas. But with this latest book she finally comes down to Earth and shows that all of the other humans are just as interesting as the mystical beings she creates from scratch.