“So You Want to be a Wizard?” by Diane Duane

I recently got access to my local library’s collection of ebooks, and the first one that I grabbed was this book. I loved the Young Wizards series when I was younger, and it’s still my favorite conception of magic and how it could work. Duane is a masterful world builder, which is evident even in this first installment, and from here the series only grows.

This book follows Nita, a thirteen-year-old who has a tendency to get beat up at school for being an outcast. One day when she’s running from her bullies, she hides in the library and her finger gets snagged on a book titled So You Want to be a Wizard? Intrigued, she started reading, takes her Wizard Oath, and is popped into a world of magic. She befriends Kit, a boy in the neighborhood who is also a newly minted wizard, and they go on a journey together, primarily to get Nita’s pen back from her local bully, but also to learn about wizardry and stop the forces of death and entropy.

What makes this my favorite conception of magic is that it relies heavily on language and the power of words. Spells are essentially words spoken in the Speech, a language that all animate and inanimate things understand. Wizards use the Speech to convince things to be different than they are. What you say has power in this world, it can change reality.

It also has a grounding in physics, not to a severely technical degree, but essentially wizards are people who fight against entropy, or the energy being wasted in the universe. They order the energy and conserve it, to prolong the inevitable heat death of the universe. Additionally Nita is a huge space buff, which comes into play more with other books, but there is a character who is literally a white hole here. Most fantasy books tend to be very Earth-centric, and I think it’s fascinating that this series accounts for aliens with magic (again something that comes up in future books) and the rest of Earth too for that matter (also future installments).

Revisiting this book as an adult was a lot of fun, different things stuck out to me, or I forgot about them since I was younger. Primarily was the fact that Duane mentions the Twin Towers in her description of New York City, which led me to notice that this book was published in 1983! And she is still working on the series!

I also picked up on the diversity much more, Kit is Hispanic and speaks Spanish at home. Additionally there’s two older wizards that they go to for help, Tom and Carl. I never realized when I was younger but they are definitely a gay couple! I haven’t read the more recent books in a while, but I wonder if that gets more explicit later.

It is an excellent book to start off the series with. I get the feeling that Duane knows what she wants the world to look like, but she is showing the reader what Nita and Kit are finding so we can all explore it together. Also breaks it into more manageable chunks. I was surprised how many details come into play in later books, there are rarely characters or concepts that she mentions in passing that don’t come back later.

I wish I could say that I’ll be reading the rest of the series, but I realized once I was done with this one that the library doesn’t have the rest of it! So I will have to wait to continue this rereading.