So You Want to be a Wizard

I'm pretty sure I should not have had as much trouble getting started in So You Want to be A Wizard by Diane Duane as I did. This novel just did not catch me in the beginning, and I'm not sure why. I suspect I found this novel too late in life. If I had read it as a tween/young teen it might have resonated more than reading it as a middle age woman. I guess one thing that threw me off was the bantering amount of physic terminology that I found distracting in preteen kids. Once I got past that, I did enjoy the novel.

Because it is a novel about young wizards learning their skills, much comparison is made between this novel and "Harry Potter." I think it is really unfair to both novels. First off, although people may have discovered it after "Pottermania," So You Want to Be a Wizard was actually written in 1983, more than 10 years before JK Rowling spawned her adorable brood of wizards. In Ms. Duane's novel, the children are basically left to themselves to learn magic by trial and error from a text book. To me this novel reminded me more of Michael Ende's marvelous The Never Ending Story. A story about a young child who becomes engrossed in books, because of an inattentive parent. I know Nita's parents try to be supportive of her, but let's be honest, they fail. This child(ren) saves the world on their own, and learns how powerful they are in the process will resonate with any child struggling to fit into a world.

I think it is also important to remember that this novel is about children of color, years before this was an issue with media attention. Although not much is made of it in the novel, Kit (Christopher) is in fact Hispanic, and starts to learn magic because he keeps getting beat up because of his accent.

I'm not sure if I will read more of these novels. There is just a ton of them, 10 in all, and I'm not sure I want to invest more time in them. Not because they were bad but I just don't know if I can appreciate them like I would have as a young person. 3 of 5 stars