Duane, Diane - So You Want to Be a Wizard

[oyceter]

Nita keeps being beat up by the mean girls at school, so one day, she runs into the library to try and escape them. And there, among all the other So You Want to Be... career books for kids, she finds So You Want to Be a Wizard. She eventually makes friends with Kit, who is also being picked on at school and who also found a copy of the book. Together, they fight crime the evil forces of the universe!

I never read these as a kid, so it's interesting coming to them as an adult. There are a lot of cool bits in this book, from the importance of books and reading and language to being able to talk to trees. Some of the cool bits are fairly standard ones that didn't excite me (magic via Speech, talking to trees), but others were pretty nifty (a burping white hole, talking to machines).

You can clearly see the Tolkein and L'Engle influences on this book, and while I think the Gollum-take is a shoutout to Tolkein, many of the L'Engle influences look more like fic with the numbers filed off than shoutouts, just because so much of the plot is out of A Wind Through the Doors. I didn't mind in the beginning, but the similarities ended up throwing me out of what should have been the main emotional climax of the book.

That said, what makes this book stand apart from the hordes of other "kids discover secret powers and save the world" books is its sense of place. Duane loves New York City, and it shows.

Also, yay for Kit being Hispanic! I am not sure if Nita is or not; her first name is "Juanita," but I think her last name is "Callahan."

I was a little irked at the more traditional male/female split of talents between Kit and Nita; Kit (the boy) leans more toward talking with mechanical objects like cars and trains, while Nita (the girl) has more abilities to talk to plants.

But it was still a fun and fast read, and despite the L'Engle bits, there's enough of Duane's own neat ideas that I may go through the series.

Comments

[oyceter]

Oh, I loved the car! And the carnage!

I think the one thing that really dropped me out of the book was (spoilers for this book and L'Engle's A Wind in the Door) when Fred sacrificed himself to save everyone, just because he had already been reminding me of Progo, and it was just like the scene in which Progo Xes himself. But other than that, I really liked things like the carnivorous fire hydrant.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Oh, interesting. I'd been reading that quite differently: unlike Duane's, L'Engle's books are not (in my experience) about throwing oneself carefully at difficult tasks and burning so brightly one may overextend, whether metaphorically or not. I saw Fred as capsule foreshadowing (forebrightening?) for events you haven't met yet, in book #2 (Deep Wizardry)--and Duane does this a lot: having key characters give much of themselves, then keep giving, sometimes finding that they have more reserves than they'd thought (and sometimes not).

Originally, too, I read the L'Engle and Duane's two wizard books (all there was at the time) the same year, so I'm doubly interested by your link because I didn't see it then at all. :) If you do continue to Deep Wizardry, which is stronger than So You Want, I'm curious to see what you think.

*relurks*

[oyceter]

Interesting! I think I read Fred's death as more sacrificial than anything else, possibly because I'd already had the Fred/Progo connection in my head. But it read as Fred throwing himself in it and sort of knowing that it would have really serious consequences for him.

I stuck further comments on the L'Engle/Duane comparison here, if you're interested.