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.

Books with Pictures

Comic books -- or should I say "graphic novels"? -- are coming up in the world, but as far as my experience is concerned, people still don't take you entirely seriously if you enjoy reading them. This strikes me as incredibly silly. One of the prevailing tests of "culture" in the western world seems to be one's ability to appreciate the visual arts; another is, of course, one's ability to appreciate the literary arts. So why is it that an artform which combines the visual and literary, often in stunning and innovative ways, gets such a bad rap?

Part of it, I suspect, stems from the fact that "picture books" are considered the province of children, "comic books" the domain of adolescents, and "chapter books" the signal that one has moved up into something like (young) adulthood. The smaller the print, and the fewer the pictures, the more "grown-up" something is. But this makes the huge mistake of equating literary form with content. While it's true that a lot of books for kids have pictures, and most books for adults don't, this doesn't mean that the picture book is an inherently poor medium for addressing "grown-up" ideas. I'll be the first to admit that I have only read a limited number of what I think of as picture books for grown-ups, but the ones that I have read have blown me away. Art Spiegelman famously uses the format to tell the story of his father's struggles as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and his own struggles with what his father's history means to him. Shaun Tan's work is more whimsical -- I fell in love with one story in Tales from Outer Suburbia about the afterlife of lost or discarded notes and scribblings -- but even if his subject matter doesn't always appear complex, his treatment is always nuanced. (If you want to read a really good essay on picture books by someone who knows them better than I do, check out his "Picture Books: Who Are They For?".)

Most recently, I've been working my way through the ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which feel about as intertextual as a T. S. Eliot poem, full of references to mythologies, history, and history, western and eastern, modern and ancient -- and still manage to keep this allusion in the background and tell a series of compelling stories about identity, duty, personal choice, and the things that make us human. When the cover tells you the story is "suggested for mature readers," I like to believe that this isn't because there's sex or violence or other things people don't want to think their kids are reading (though sometimes there is). It's because it takes a mature mind to appreciate the complexity of the universe Gaiman has crafted. I don't see how any reader could fail to take seriously a text in which the character of Lucifer ironically quotes from John Milton's Paradise Lost -- and then cites his own quotation!

Some of the stigma against comics may also stem from the assumption that they are newfangled inventions of an unpredictable popular culture, therefore lacking the respectability of tradition and elite status. There is a much larger question at hand here, about what constitutes "popular" and what constitutes "literary" (and why the two should be considered separately, if they should be at all), but on the small scale it seems important to point out that supposedly "literary" works have been relying on pictures for hundreds of years. Dickens and Thackeray both supervised the illustration of many of their major novels (with Thackeray even contributing his own illustrations, in come cases). William Blake is the prime example: he invented his own reverse-etching technique and hand-etched his poems alongside images that he watercolored after they had been printed. To call them "illustrations" is to miss the point; often, instead of simply "illustrating" the kinds of things discussed in the poems, Blake's images provide additional clues to interpretation, or serve to increase readerly confusion. Since all the pages were colored by hand, no two are the same, and radically different versions of the same poem exist -- for example, look at these two different prints of "The Tyger":

(If you're looking for more, check out the Blake Archive, where you can access images of Blake's works held in different collections across the world.)

So, if comics aren't "kid stuff" and they aren't really "new," what's the problem? As a final guess, I'd suggest that, while we live in a world that bombards us with thousands of images on a daily basis, we're only very rarely asked to read them. Comics, graphic novels, picture books -- call them what you will, this is exactly what they demand of us. By juxtaposing images and text, they call attention to the fact that pictures, in addition to simply being seen, can be read, and they challenge us to perform this reading, which is a challenge precisely because so many of the images we encounter on a daily basis seem to demand internalization without reading (just think of most advertising). In the process, they make some people a little uncomfortable -- but if art doesn't do that, at least a little, then I'm not entirely sure it is art to begin with.