7 compact dics. Because she insists on fighting with words instead of her fists, 13-year-old Nita is regularly tormented by a gang of classmates. One day, running to escape their blows, she hides in the only safe place nearby-the library. When a book about wizardry catches her eye, Nita finds the help she needs in its pages. As she moves from chapter to chapter, Nita learns more sophisticated spells. Soon, stepping through a worldgate, she enters a shadowy city swirling with vicious taxicabs and carnivorous fire plugs. What begins as a simple quest quickly becomes a struggle to keep a powerful and ominous force from passing back into Nita's world. Ranked with the best of Madeleine L'Engle and Diana Wynne Jones, Diane Duane's magical tale of wizardry and wisdom has become a modern fantasy classic. Christina Moore's delightful narration captures all the excitement and danger in this thrilling fantasy adventure.
Diane Duane was born in New York City -- a descendant of New York's first mayor -- and worked there as a psychiatric nurse before leaving the profession for the only one she loved better, the business of writing. Since the publication of her first novel in 1981, she's written fifty more, not to mention numerous short stories, comics, computer games and screenplays for TV and film, and has picked up the occasional award here and there. (She has also worked with Star Trek in more media than anyone else alive.)
Right now she's probably best known for her "Young Wizards" series of young adult fantasy novels, featuring the New York-based wizards Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan -- in business for twenty-five years now, their most recent adventure being described in the ninth YW novel, "A Wizard of Mars" (just released in paperback).
DD shares a two hundred-year-old cottage in the Wicklow Mountains of Ireland with her husband, the Belfast-born novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood, a laid-back white cat named Goodman, and various overworked computers... an odd but congenial environment for the staging of epic battles between good and evil and the leisurely pursuit of total galactic domination. (And a lot of ethnic cooking: her own favorite foods come from the cuisines of central Europe and the Mediterranean.) In her spare time she gardens (weeding, mostly), studies German and Italian, listens to shortwave and satellite radio, and dabbles in astronomy, computer graphics, iaido, amateur cartography, and desktop publishing ... while also trying to figure out how to make more spare time.
Her favorite color is blue, her favorite food is a weird kind of Swiss scrambled-potato dish called maluns, she was born in a Year of the Dragon, and her sign is "Runway 24 Left, Hold For Clearance."
