Book Review: So You Want To Be A Wizard

I have a book review up at Writers' Tea Party for the first book in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series, So You Want To Be A Wizard.


Book Review by Sel: So You Want To Be A Wizard

It's not a famous book or a particularly popular one, but I love it very much, because the book - and the series - is not only well-written but contains some wonderful philosophical concepts of life, the universe, and how we see the world and our place in it.

I particularly like it because I first read it at age twenty-seven, and while it was targeted at the YA audience, it never spoke down to them or treated them like they couldn't understand what was going on. If anything, the book (and subsequent series) assumes its readers are intelligent, thoughtful people, who want to make a difference - just as its main characters do.

This isn't the dysfunctional struggles of Katniss' society in the Hunger Games, nor the wonder and magic of Harry Potter or Percy Jackson: this is the real world...difficult and complicated, but with hope.

It was written thirty years ago now, in a political, social, technical, and economic climate far different from the one we stand in now, but I think that the people reading the story haven't changed all that much - we're still human with all our dreams and all our nightmares: the best of us and the worst of us.

And a message with hope of a better future and our part in it will always speak to all generations.

introduction

"A writer isn't one person pretending to be many people,
but many people pretending to be one."
I speak jokingly of 'the voices in my head' and have for a great many years now, so this quotation resonates with me at a gut level.

From the dancing-singing quartet I wrote about back when I was ten, to the current novel I'm working on, I've always had other people wandering about in my head.

Occasionally they managed to break out onto the page, but many have bided their time through the years, waiting, watching, wanting that glimpse of reality that my expression can give them.

Maybe they'll have their day. Maybe they'll sink into the depths of my grey matter as the Dance Group quartet did, their time come and gone with the years and my childhood. Or maybe they'll find their footing, climb up through the torturous vestiges of my brain to reach the light of day (or the glow of the computer screen?) and find shape and form on the page - and perhaps someday not just form on the page, but in other people's minds as they read my published stories.

We can hope.