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

[dduane.livejournal.com]

(wanders through) (Waves)

Just to clarify: I did read the first few of L'Engle's YA fantasies when I was in my (thinks) late teens? early twenties? Somewhere there. But her style put me off, and I never read the books that followed.

Also, if there was one of those books that particularly affected me, it would have been A Wind in the Door, which struck me somehow as far better than the book(?s) that led up to it.

...That said: there's always the possibility that something or other in A Wrinkle in Time got under the skin of my brain, as it were, and re-expressed itself here and there in SYWTBAW. But this is an occupational hazard. Writers do have to be careful about what they read. (And this is why I have not read the HP books, and won't read them, probably not for many years: because people who don't look at publication dates tend to assume that the books are outright ripoffs of JKR's material, or an attempt to ride her coattails (the pub dates make clear that this isn't the case) or are only in print because of JKR's success (the republication of the series by Harcourt began the year before Philosopher's Stone came out, and had been contracted for the year before that).

(sigh) Re Gollum: Know him well, of course, but the SYWTBAW dragon's hissing has nothing to do with him. That kind of dragon, well, just hisses. (It is, after all, the source of the steam that comes from under the Manhattan streets. See here (http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWiki/index.php/Fireworm) for details.)

Anyway. (Waves again, wanders on...)

[oyceter]

Hi!

Also, if there was one of those books that particularly affected me, it would have been A Wind in the Door, which struck me somehow as far better than the book(?s) that led up to it.

*nods* Yes, I was mostly seeing similarities to A Wind in the Door.

Thank you for the information.