Diane Duane

Publisher: Magic Carpet Books
Publication Year: 1983
Print price: $6.95

I’ve only ridden in a New York City taxicab once in my life, but one time was more than enough to engrave the experience in my mind forever. The cab sped down an extremely crowded street, weaving between other cars and pedestrians, making me grip whatever I could reach so hard my knuckles turned white. Imagine, now, that the cab has gained the ability to think on its own and is out to kill anything in its path.

Taxicabs are just one of the many objects that come alive in Diane Duane’s So You Want to Be a Wizard. The story opens with a 13 year old girl, Nita, who finds a mysterious book in the library that claims to have the ability to turn her into a wizard. Curious, as anyone would be, she reads the wizard’s oath aloud, beginning an adventure that starts out as pure fun and intrigue, but turns into something truly frightening. With the help of a fellow new wizard, Kit, and a white hole from space (who they name Fred), Nita travels to another Earth-like world without a sun. There, along with the mutant taxicabs, they are chased by dragons, encounter a species of man-eaters called perytons, and bring statues and trees to life as they fight against a man out to destroy this world as they know it.

At first, I didn’t know if a book from the early ’80s about such young characters would entertain me, but I was pleasantly surprised. Nita and Kit deal with problems in a sophisticated and interesting manner, as they learn to embrace, manage, and use their new abilities in a story line complex enough to keep a reader of any age thinking. The creatures were truly frightening at times and nothing about the book comes off as a cliché young wizards story. The story brought me back to a time when I would have given anything for proof that magic is real, a characteristic alone that makes this story worth reading.