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

[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.