So you want to be a wizard
Thirteen-year-old Nita, tormented by a gang of bullies because she won't fight back, finds the help she needs in a library book on wizardry which guides her into another dimension.
Stats for nerds
5recommend
7mentions
6people
2010–2020years
71% recommend29% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "So You Want To Be A Wizard". I don't know if it's too late to read it as an adult, but make sure any kid you know has a chance to read it early.
In life's name, and for life's sake.
- Diane Duane sells her books directly, as DRM-free epubs [0]. Was quite happy when, a decade after first reading it, I found out So You Want To Be A Wizard wasn't standalone and wanted to continue the series.
- The title makes me wonder whether she was a fan of Diane Duane's "So You Want to Be a Wizard" series, which predated Harry Potter and shows a remarkably science-based wizardry with much the same mindset towards learning.
- Fair enough. I do very quickly skip stories that seem like a sitcom with fantasy elements thrown in. Then again, there are a lot of non-YA fantasy novels about broken people (teenage or adult) with highly non-fantastic problems; that seems to be a defining element of bad fiction for all ages, that it can't manage to escape the mundane. I have zero interest in reading about the everyday problems and situations of twentysomethings or thirtysomethings either.
Another good example of YA fantasy I've enjoyed that manages to dodge the trope: Diane Duane's Wizards series ("So you want to be a Wizard", "Deep Wizardry", "High Wizardry"), which seems to mostly stay away from typical teenager problems. The premise is not that novel, but in this case I found the execution quite satisfying, particularly in the second and third books. Without providing spoilers, I would note that the second book manages to avert one of the single most common tropes of YA fantasy novels (and of other series that avert it, most do so far later in a series). I'm also a big fan of "sufficiently descriptive language as magic" and "sufficiently analyzed magic", both of which these have quite a lot of.
(Note that I have not read the "updated" editions of these books that attempt to make some of the technology references less dated.)
- >The first three books of "The Wrinkle in Time" series.
Why does everyone keep recommending books for teenagers that I read in elementary school?
I mean, hell, if we're going for epic high fantasy set in the (recognizably) modern world, try So You Want to be a Wizard by Diane Duane.
And to those of you who tried taking the Oath when you were a child, yes, the rest of us did, too. Pity it didn't take.
- > Entropy is not part of the cultural and mainstream consciousness like Darwinism is.
Taking advantage of this to drop one of my favorite book series (though I'm a few books behind): _Young Wizards_ [0], where wizards exist in-universe to fight entropy, so that the universe can continue to exist as long as possible. The series is possibly best known by the name of the first book, _So You Want to Be a Wizard_, which for a long time I thought was the name of the series.
(Another interesting thing about this series is that magic is treated as a programming language for reality, a few books in going so far as referring to subroutines, variables, and so on)
