Why I Love Young Wizards

When I first started this blog almost a year ago, my goal was clear: I needed someplace to squee, rant, and flail -- albeit in a slightly more academic manner -- about the things that I loved most in life and literature. Up at the top of the flail-worthy list is, and has always been, Diane Duane's Young Wizards series. I started reading these books when I was in the sixth grade, waiting for something to fill the void between Harry Potter books, and ended up falling head over heels for characters and a story and a world that made Harry Potter look like child's play, even to an eleven-year-old.

Since then, I've been attempting (and failing) to come up with some coherent way to express my love for this series while simultaneously making every single person who read my explanation go to their local library and find a copy of So You Want to Be a Wizard. I've recommended the series to everyone I know. I've posted about it on other sites. I've even made my mother read it.

None of this has served the ultimate purpose: to create a world in which all the cool people have read these books. This post probably won't either. But in the wake of Diane Duane's release of the long-form blurb for the tenth book in the series, tentatively titled Games Wizards Play, I feel the need to talk a little more about why these books have such a special place in my heart.

1. These are books for geeks, by a geek, that understand and make no apologies for their own geekiness (while simultaneously feeling very accessible to people who wouldn't necessarily class themselves as geeks). To the teenager I was, they were valuable because they showed me that people like me -- nerdy bookworms who'd been reading chapter books since age four and owned library cards before their peers even knew where the library was -- were important, and lovable, and not alone. To this day, these books inspire me to embrace my geek, and to be proud of it, even in circles (read: academia) where this is unexpected if not exactly unacceptable. If I'd known more geeky adults growing up, I doubt I ever would have felt uncomfortable being who I was.

2. These books have wizards. AND aliens. AND alien wizards. To phrase it as one of Duane's main characters might, it's like there really are Jedi out there. I pretty much can't think of a better sort of universe to live in. (Yes, I am a geek. See point #1.)

3. These books are also very firmly grounded in what grown-ups very frequently call "the real world." The initial protagonists, Kit and Nita, are young teens in the New York suburbs who find themselves having to juggle wizardry with the rest of their lives, with varied results. This is urban fantasy at its best, integrating what we know with what we don't and paying particular attention to the seams between these pieces.

4. The register of the books can slip from comic to dramatic in a matter of instants without the shift seeming awkward or forced. Furthermore, the jokes are funny, and the climactic scenes are stomach-clenching.

5. The language is spot-on. The dialogue sounds like the kind of dialogue that people might actually speak, and Duane's descriptive prose is so stunningly beautiful that I still stand back in awe of some passages. And she switches between the sort of mundane "invisible" prose and this more heavily-wrought description so flawlessly that I'm never startled by it, and only upon looking back do I realize that the shift has happened.

6. Diane Duane remembers her childhood. She doesn't assume that kids can't do things or that their experience of life is fundamentally different from adults'. As such, she writes kids who are fully, believably, and lovably kids. She doesn't idealize childhood as a problem-free zone, and she's great at tackling the kinds of problems that kids really do have in a real and respectful manner.

7. Unlike most young adult fantasy, which seems only capable of granting power to children in the absence of their parents, the Young Wizards series shows that parents and children can work together and be open and honest and loving with each other, while still allowing children to be who they are and make their own decisions. There are no evil stepmothers or wicked stepfathers here.

8. Magic doesn't fix everything. In fact, it often seems to make things more complicated: for example, if you get into a fight with your best friend you can ignore him for a while, but if your best friend also happens to be your partner in wizardry, you'll have to work it out sooner rather than later. Wizardry never functions as a deus ex machina, and thus is never cheapened -- but there are some things that it just can't do.

9. Magic isn't easy. Harry Potter might have been my "gateway drug" into YA fantasy, but in retrospect the idea that you can just point a wand and say a word to do a spell seems so simplistic. Duane's magic is difficult, something that must be learned and for which you must pay a price, but this makes mastering it all the more worthwhile.

10. The metaphysics of the Young Wizards universe might hinge on the expected cosmic good-and-evil axis, but they do so in complex ways that are never moralizing. Duane's vision of a wizardly afterlife known as Timeheart, where "what's loved survives," is the most poignant and -- to use a word you don't hear too often -- just that I have ever encountered. If I could trade whatever metaphysical reality we live in now for any specific fictional one, it would be this one.

11. Words are magical. While a lot of fantasy authors craft systems of magic around the use of specific words, or magical languages, I haven't read one to beat Duane's -- and I've read a lot. More importantly, though, it's not just words spoken in the wizardly Speech that matter. These novels persistently value the act of talking, in any language, with other people. Sometimes it's about solving disputes, or breaking barriers, or fighting past prejudices, but sometimes it's just about getting to know amiable beings a little bit better.

12. School matters. These aren't kids who just prance around saving the world and miraculously getting A's on everything without having to study. They have to work for their grades the same way they have to work for their wizardry.

13. You don't have to be a wizard to be important. Throughout the course of the series, we meet several characters who know about magic but aren't themselves wizards, and Duane is very insistent that they don't need to be wizards in order to make a difference. Thus, there is hope for us all.

14. Minor characters are incredibly well-developed. Some of them even come back later on and stop being quite so minor. I haven't met a single person in the novels so far who I didn't feel like I knew, somehow, even after just a couple of pages.

15. Alien characters are incredibly well-developed. By this, I mean that they do seem alien, with separate cultures and worldviews and all that comes along with it, but are never quite so alien that you wouldn't consider having one as a friend.

16. Duane deals with Important Life Issues without it ever feeling like "dealing with Important Life Issues" is what these novels are about. The philosophy seems to be that life is full of these big important things, and any novel attempting to accurately portray something like life will necessarily involve these, too. As a result, the novels involve themselves in questions of bullying, sacrifice, depression, politics, death, religion, friendship, love, and beyond -- without ever feeling like they're trying to teach you something. To (mis)quote one of her characters, life doesn't have a moral, though sometimes it is one.

17. At the bottom of all of this lies a fundamental wonder at the universe -- a desire to get to know it better, to help it be the best it can, and to engage other people in doing the same. To me, this wonder is at the heart of childhood, and something that adults too easily forget. It's also at the heart of science fiction done right.

18. Last (for now) -- but not least -- these novels continue to meet me where I am in my life, and offer me something new each time. I've been reading and re-reading them now for almost half of my life, and they never fail to be exactly what I need.