When it came to the New Millenium Editions of the Young Wizards series, I was probably the most curious about this one. (You can see posts on previous books in the series: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth.) The book has to do a lot with grief, and also with autism. So, you can imagine that it would need an update from its original publication in 2002, we now know a lot more about neurodivergence than previously.
The book alternates between Kit and Nita’s narration. Kit’s house has been having a “wizardly leakage” of sorts where the TV and the remote yell at each other in Japanese and Ponch is still coming into his powers. He’s worried about Nita, who is grieving her mother, but doesn’t want to press. He gets contacted by the Senior wizards, there’s a new wizard who has been on his Ordeal for several months. Kit goes to find the new wizard, Darryl, and finds out that he’s an African-American autistic boy. He was diagnosed young, but began to have a much harder time coping with his environment a few months ago. Kit is surprised by this, but as the Senior wizard reminds him, wizardry isn’t reserved for the neurotypical. Kit goes home and researches autism, including reading about what autistic people have written about it. He starts using Ponch’s abilities to jump between worlds to enter Darryl’s mind. Shortly after this though, Kit starts to take on some of Darryl’s characteristics including being withdrawn, and he shortly goes back into Darryl’s mind against the counsel of the senior wizards.
Nita meanwhile has been having a hard time grieving her mother. She’s frustrated with the other students that treat her as fragile, and even more annoyed with those that pretend nothing happened. Thankfully she has a pretty good counselor at school, but feeling like she has to take care of her dad and sister is leaving her drained. She starts having dreams, first it’s a clown going in circles, then a giant robot. She thinks it’s for Dairine at first, but then realizes that it’s Darryl! After doing some research, she learns that Darryl is an Abdal, or a Pillar, he’s essentially a saint or a direct conduit for the One Power that created life. She realizes that Darryl has been prolonging his Ordeal to try and trap a fragment of the Lone Power that created death at his own expense. She then realizes that Kit has disappeared to go back in there and will get stuck as well so she goes in after him.
Once in there Nita finds Darryl’s kernel, the instructions for his internal world that she learned about in the last book to save her mom, and tweaks it so she has an easier time. She joins the others and smashes a mirror that represents the trap that Darryl has set. The Lone Power leaves, with the agreement that Darryl will stay and trap him further. (The Long Power knows that Darryl is a Pillar so the extra investment in him makes sense. But also Darryl now knows he can be in multiple places at once from interacting with Nita and Kit separately so this trap isn’t an issue for him.) Nita offers that Darryl use the kernel to tweak his brain, and Darryl explicitly refuses to do so. He wants to keep his autism, to keep playing the hand he has been dealt. They all head home, and end up meeting up with Darryl on the moon. Darryl is clearly still autistic, he has a harder time with some aspects of conversation. But he’s gotten much better at dealing with his environment.
Alright so there were a lot of changes made here. I couldn’t remember the full details of the original, so I did do some digging and found both a review from an autistic individual and a post from the author that talks about this a little. The original version didn’t have the caveat that wizardry isn’t just for neurotypical individuals, and the autism is portrayed as a symptom of how Darryl has been keeping the Lone Power trapped in his inner universe. So when you get to the end of the book, Darryl gets “cured” of the autism and emerges as a neurotypical person. And that’s been criticized, of course. Having said that, before that point the portrayal of autism is fairly representative and respectful. But the ending certainly needed to be changed. My favorite inclusion though was of Kit researching autism and reading about autism from autistic people which you so rarely see. Plus his mom, who’s a nurse, talks about how autism can look so different between different people and this is just one person’s experience which is good. So the new editions are a major step up, and I’m honestly so impressed that an author went back and did so many edits in response to feedback from readers! Really nice to see.
Of course the other part of this book that I appreciate is the discussion of grief. This is largely Nita’s side of the plot, where she’s dealing with her mother’s recent death. At the beginning of the book, she doesn’t feel well enough to help Kit with this because she doesn’t want to let him down. She also has her own conversation with the Senior wizards about how she’s obsessively been looking up vocabulary after her interactions with the clown and robot. And they tell her to take her time, grief is on its own time and she shouldn’t do anything until she’s ready. By the end of the book though, she is pissed off, and ready to use that anger to save Kit. She’s annoyed at herself for taking so long when her wizardry partner clearly needed her. And at the end of the book she’s ready to tell the counselor that she’s done, she certainly isn’t over her mother’s death, but she’s ready to be a part of life more actively now. I don’t think it’s a perfect representation, maybe if she also went to normal therapy and not just grief counseling I’d feel better, but I do like the caveat that she isn’t totally unaffected by her mom’s death anymore. Grief is really weird where you’ll feel fine, and then suddenly it’ll hit you all over again. Or you’ll be openly experiencing it and be like “ok good I’m supposed to feel this so I’m feeling it and also this SUCKS.” There’s so many contradictions to it. So this is a good start to showing that in fiction, and since all of the other representations are so bad this really stands out.
So that’s this book! Moving onwards to the next one.
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