Deep Wizardry by Diane Duane

[meganbmoore]

I read Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard? about two years ago and loved it. Granted, I was possibly at least partly seduced by the library and how much books factored into the plot and how books and reading were important. I’m the sort of person who pulls out Mirrormask just to rewatch the part about the library, after all.

Deep Wizardry takes place sometime after SYWTBAW?, with Kit and Nita at the beach for summer vacation with Nita’s family when another wizard asks for help. Normally, the adult wizards in charge of Kit and Nita would take care of it, but they’re also on vacation, and Kit and Nita are the only ones available. The catch? The other wizard is a whale, and to help the wizard, Kit and Nita have to become sea animals themselves so they can help fill out a circle needed to complete an underwater ritual.

You know, I love-and I do mean love-sea lore, but I’m not really big on narratives that emphasize environmental issues and “nature good, humans bad,” and DW treads dangerously close to that sometimes. As a result, I didn’t enjoy the underwater plot as much as I would have otherwise.

I did, however, like Kit and Nita dealing with trying to keep their being wizards from her parents, and how that played out. I don’t really like plots that revolve around kids misbehaving and sneaking around, so I was somewhat irritated by that early on, but I did like how they didn’t get away with it, and that her parents reacted fairly realistically. I’m also very glad her parents weren’t remotely villified. Too much fiction seems to use the villification of authority as a shortcut to justify the behavior of the leads, and that can get tiring, so it’s nice to have that deliberately avoided.

While I didn’t like it as much as SYWTBAW?, I did like DW, and need to figure out what I did with the third book in the series. 

Comments

[gleckia.livejournal.com]

It has been a long time since I read both of the books, but I do remember having a similar reaction.

SYWTBAW is the stronger book. I should do a re-read and then get on with the rest of them. When I read the books, she had only written the two.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

It's that pesky "humans bad, nature better" thing. I get where they're coming from with it, usually, but...

[gleckia.livejournal.com]

Also concider when those two books were written. SYWTBAW-1983 DW 1985



The entrance of the moral majority.

Reagan's appointment of two very non-enviromentaly appointees to the department of the Interior and the EPA.

The fear of Nuclear Power and Weapons.

The cold war. The fear that either of the two players would "hit the big red button" and make the whole world unlivable in their quest to destroy each other.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's why I'm a lot more forgiving of those things than I would be normally.

[rhap-chan.livejournal.com]

Hmm, well I'm not sure how you'll feel about High Wizardry (the third book) because it mainly stars Nita's sister, Dairine, in the title role, and the focus is on technology and life-- how many varieties of life there are, how alive technology can be, etc. It's better than Deep Wizardry and the 4th book, but the 5th and 6th books are very, very good in my opinion. I love this series.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I liked Dairine.

I've heard things across the board about the individual books in the series. They seem to appeal to different people in different ways.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the books play off differently. I love the first one, absolutely adore the second one (mostly because I really love Ed) and was bored by the third one. I'm still reading them, but I don't know if any of the more recent ones are as strong as the first two.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Frankly, to me, her books are wildly uneven. I loved SYWTBAW, was entertained by DW and HATED HW mainly because I really hated how Nita's already super-special sister got even more super special.

A Wizard Abroad is excellent, iirc, and then the next two are less good.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm about 200 pages into HW now. I don't think the problem is that Dairine is super-special so much as it is that everyone is way too freaking powerful. Sure, we can look at Dairine and go "WTF? Already she's hopping galaxies?" (Never mind that Kit and Nita were going to other dimension in their first book.) But in HW, they made a big deal about going to the moon. Now the moon is basically Kit and Nita's tree house.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

That is a very, very good point.