Wizards At War [Paperback]

Diane Duane (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Harcourt Children's Books (2005)
• ASIN: B000VB95JA
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)

More About the Author

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."

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

69 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars So this is the first review, huh? :), September 14, 2005

By 

S. Christensen "reveuse" (Boise, ID United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Wizards at War (The Young Wizards, Book 8) (Hardcover)

I've been waiting for someone to review this book for a while now, but I broke down and bought it so maybe I'm going to have to start the ball rolling.

First of all, this is a series book so I'd better give a little background.

Nita Callahan hid in a library once when she was thirteen and found a special book there...a manual of wizardry. For the Powers that created life, the Powers that Be, sometimes enlist a little help in preserving and defending life against the Lone Power that brought entropy and death into the universe. And that is why there are wizards. Together, Nita and her fellow-wizard Kit Rodriguez passed the ordeal that made them wizards. Somehow, they've survived underwater adventures, the cataclysmic Ordeal of Nita's sister, Dairine, wizardry on assignment in Ireland, losing the fight for Nita's mother's life, the depths of grief, and dealing with the Power that almost destroyed the paradise Nita and Kit went on a vacation in.

No sooner do they get back to earth, though, then the local Seniors, Tom and Carl, stop by to drop the biggest bomb ever: something is splitting the universe apart at the seams, wizardry itself is failing, and Nita, Kit, and a few selected others are (for the time-being) in charge of keeping the Earth running! Now even the youngest and most powerful wizards have only a few weeks to find a fix for the problem. It's up to Nita, Kit, Dairine, and the new friends visiting the Callahans' house on exchange to scour the ends of the universe for the answers. They will follow any clue, risk any danger, and pay any price to beat the odds against them, because all of existence as they know it depends on it...

If there's another book in the series this reminds me most of, it's High Wizardry. And this book has all of what makes this series worth reading. A few highlights:

-Irish wizard Ronan Nolan reappears
-Carmela's mail-order package comes in very handy :)
-Dairine meets the parents
-Nita talks to wizardry itself and creates a new spell
-Ponch talks to a big, big bug
-Chocolate (Read it. You'll understand!)
-The Crossings invaded and taken
-Enchanted cell-phones and Wiz-pods
-Kit at a loss for words at least three or four different times, all for different reasons
and...
-The secret of the strange wizardry leakage at Kit's home is revealed...but only at a haunting price.

I laughed, I cried, and I loved it. Maybe you will too!

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A parent's view of Wizards at War, October 25, 2005

By 

H. Chambers (Northern California) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Wizards at War (The Young Wizards, Book 8) (Hardcover)

I'm a teen's mom. I've read the other books in this series as my teen son did. This book brings in characters from earlier books, so I would NOT recommend that this book be the first read in the series. This book, along with the earlier books involves ethics. This is all too rare in teen's choices in reading. Each wizard, sometime as a child, was offered an opportunity to take the Wizard's Oath, then submit to an ordeal. This is when a wizard has the most raw power available - untempered yet by experience and need for control. Adults are brought into the books as Senior Wizards, mentors for the children. It is a wonderful way of explaining why the children are asked to save or mend parts of the universe when adults cannot. In this book, the stakes are even higher. The adults forget their magic in an evolving crisis with the whole universe at stake. All young wizards, from earth and far away galaxies, as well as other species such as cats and whales get involved. Some of the characters that were important in earlier books are prepared to give their lives for this battle. Some do, some are transformed in some very interesting twists. As each book ended, I wondered how the author could top that book. And then, I was delighted by the next book written, as was true this time.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't compare this with Harry Potter; it's completely different., November 18, 2005

By 

shadodantz "shadodantz" (Billings Mt) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wizards at War (The Young Wizards, Book 8) (Hardcover)

Just because there is 'magic' involved, this series has been compared with that of J. K. Rowling's <u>Harry Potter</u>. That is too simplistic a comparison (rather like comparing Bram Stoker's <u>Dracula</u> to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's <u>le Comte de Saint-Germain</u>).
Though both series have magic as a force extant in the real world, how it is used is completely different.
Ms Rowling's characters use it mostly as a convenience, while for Ms Duane's characters it is more of a tool to accomplish very difficult tasks that (hopefully) slow down the progression of entropy.
Big difference there.
I won't try to summarize this book, don't want to put in spoilers. It has more subplot than its predeccessors, with relationships between the various characters becoming more complex. The original Kit/Nita dynamic, while strong as ever, moves upstage a bit, making way for the newer, sometimes spiky combinations of Dairine/Roshaun, Kit/Ponch, Kit/Carmela, Ronan/'Michael', Carmela/Ronan, and Nita as reluctant, inadvertant sporadic 'foreteller' and Greek chorus.
There is the expected (at least for me) laugh-out-loud scenes that come without warning when Ms. Duane turns things on their ear, as well as the shivers-and-tears-in-the-eyes scenes that aren't necessarily sad. There is loss. There is joy. There is growth, and redemption, and surprise, and determination...and there is also more than a hint that there will be another story in this series.