This is the third of a series that I really wanted to like, enough to buy the whole set in one go – and I’m so disappointed that it didn’t work out that way. On the good side, the visit to an alien airport was fun, and briefly lifted the book, and the race of little machine creatures was cute, if a little cutesy. I'm giving it three stars because, while problematic, it wasn't bad, as such - just really not the exciting, emotionally involving children's fantasy I hoped it would be.First of all, it reads like a narrative strung around Apple product placement. The amount of precious page space spent talking about how amazing and wonderful Apple computers are, up to and including Dairine getting a special magical Apple, is just ridiculous. And secondly, I feel like the author is constantly standing behind me telling me “Learning is good! Reading is awesome! Computers are exciting! Cool kids go to planetariums!” Even as a geeky kid who read every moment she could, I would have resented being told that in such a heavy-handed way. As an adult, it drives me up the wall.Part of my disappointment with these books is the muddled ethical stance – really a big problem in books so didactic about ethical issues. This is most clear in the way animals are depicted. In Deep Wizardry, sea animals and fish are speech-capable “people”, but their deaths were only tragic if they were “special” ones, and the rest were killed and eaten without negatively. This problem stretched into High Wizardry. It’s not often that I would complain that characters aren’t vegetarian, but in a book which seems to value animals above human life – it is explicitly stated that killing a dog is the ultimate evil, more evil than killing *children*, and worth dying to stop – having the characters munch unconcernedly on bologna seems a bit hypocritical. Especially when they could *talk* to the animals slaughtered for it.The worst example of this is when Dairine murders an alien – referred to as a BEM – who grasps her arm, because it “felt evil.” She does not attempt any other resolution, deliberately selecting a killing spell, and at no point is it even implied that this is anything but a perfectly moral and clever thing to do. Certainly, the murder is something she never thinks about again, her sister and friend aren’t dismayed at all by seeing footage of her do, and most of all it is not allowed to interfere with the way the narrative keeps telling us Dairine is the most good and clever and amazing girl in the entire Universe, literally the only one in billions of years to be special enough to face down the Lone Power for good.This signals another problem: yet again, the protagonist must die to save the situation, and yet again, they don’t. It’s a cop-out that is becoming awfully repetitive in this series.Dairine is a problem, too – she reads like a self-insert Mary Sue. She is just too smart, too self-reliant, too all-around fabulous and special to be remotely likeable. Like most Mary sues, although the original protagonists are still present in the book, Dairine completely pulls the focus of the book around her.Worst of all, even if you get over the inherent problems with the whole “silicon planet turns itself into a sentient supercomputer” plot, it’s just all a bit dull.I don’t think I will be finishing this series. Which is a bit sad, as Diane Duane seems like a really nice person – and I paid for it. But I’ve given it three goes now, and life is just too short.
Montana Library2Go I read this at speed, which for me and in this case meant 375 pages in 75 minutes. I would have skipped it entirely if I weren't concerned that I might need to know about some of what happens in it for future books in the series. I actively disliked Dairine in previous books and I hated her in this one. I was hoping bad things would happen to her. I wanted her knocked down 10 or 12 pegs. I longed for her to understand that her view of herself as high-and-mighty better than everyone else practically perfect was not only false, but had led her to interact with the world in a way that was worse than useless. Straight through I kept wishing that she would suddenly have a realization that she had worked so hard at believing herself to be superior that nobody liked her, she was alone in life, friendless and merely tolerated by her family. The computerized wizard's manual was a cheat by the author, plain and simple. Nita and Kit and every other human wizard on Earth have had to learn magic. They need practice, they need to work their way up, they need to collect objects that they wield to use their powers, etc. If Dairine had to follow the rules that Diane Duane had already set in place for wizardry, she wouldn't be able to be so reckless and idiotic about it. So she had to be provided with a shortcut. Thus the computer, which allows Dairine to do magic without really being involved in it in any way. She doesn't have to know anything, she doesn't have to understand anything, she doesn't have to think, or learn, or practice, or empathize, or collect totems, or do any of the other myriad sensible things that Duane created as aspects of the wizardry of this series. That's lazy. More laziness: offscreen, so to speak, Kit's family was told about his wizardry for the first time, were made to properly understand it, accept it, be wary/proud, and allow him to head off for more of it, in a matter of minutes. Yeah, right. Convenient! There was one example of lazy writing after another in this book. I'm not ok with creating a world through 2 books and then just skipping right over all the natural laws and rules of that creation because they don't serve a story that wasn't worth telling in the first place. I'm also not ok with spending a couple books creating characters who are all about empathy and understanding and saving creatures and avoiding harm and only causing suffering to the antagonist and his minions...just to throw it all out the window to speed up a story that isn't very good. The Satan/fall from Heaven crap was laziness, too, and totally unnecessary. There was nothing here I liked. After I've read book 4 and if I decide at that point to continue with the series, I'll try to remember to come back and update whether this book can be skipped without missing anything important to later books.
What do You think about High Wizardry (2003)?
Currently on book 3 of 9 in my reread. If I was a little disappointed with Deep Wizardry, High Wizardry certainly made up for it. This is the first book where I can definitely see the advantage to updating the series for the new millennium; I imagine reading this book in its original rendition would feel quite dated to a lot of tech-savvy young adults (and even to me, though I'd have the advantage of having been raised on that type of tech myself).I had forgotten how much I love Dairine. She's small, hard, and fierce, and it's easy to imagine her taking on the forces of evil with just her computer and her wits. The story itself shares the same general structure as the last two, but it's secondary to what the novel really focuses on: exploring the psyche of its characters, most particularly Dairine, but also to a good extent that of Nita, Kit, the Callahan's, the "robots", and even the Lone Power to some extent. I might be a little biased, since I tend to prefer in-depth character studies over a lot of action (not that that's lacking) but so far I'd say that High Wizardry is my favorite of the three I've reread. (Of course that'll probably change quite soon, but we'll see). My only real qualms with it is that it suffers from just a little too much religious overtones. One of the things I love about the idea of the Young Wizards version of Good vs. Evil is that it can be applied to any and all people, from Catholic to Atheist to, theoretically, non-human sentient beliefs. But the vocabulary/notions used are somewhat exclusive to the Judeo-Christian mythos. It's not really a big criticism, honestly, nor exclusive to this series-- I'm just a little bored with it narrative-wise, which is mostly personal. But for the most part it was well executed in the story, so it's not a big mark against the book at all.One thing to note (possibly a spoiler for anyone familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia): It's easy to see why the dedication is addressed to C.S. Lewis. The ending in particular is extremely reminiscent of the end of The Last Battle, though for some reason my brain keeps bringing up The Horse and His Boy too (it's been a while since I reread any Narnia novels, so I'll have to do that sometime soon to see where that connection is coming from). The idea of our reality being a shadow of a "truer" reality is not exclusive or original to Lewis, but the descriptions are a beautiful homage to his version of that idea.
—Shaina
This is Book 3 of Diane Duane's Wizard series, and like the first two books, it is very well written, containing serious and dramatic elements, believable descriptions of wizardry, and a spiritual or philosophical element running throughout. I think I liked the first two a bit better, though not because they were better books--I think I just preferred the adventures the main characters, Nita and Kit, went on. Also, Nita's sister Dairine is a major character in this one, and I never liked her, so that probably didn't help :-)Still, I love the mix of science, magic, and positive messages. The technical details occasionally were over my head, but I didn't feel that they bogged down the action--instead, it seemed like the explanations made the wizardry more plausible. The series sounds rather Harry Potter-esque, with its good vs. evil plots and young magic-makers, but it really isn't; I believe the books were written before HP, and the feel of the series is also quite different.
—Qt
I want to like these books more. Nita and Kit are good protagonists, the writing is clear and lovely, and the magic makes more sense than most.But two things stop me from loving these books. First: The Genesis story thing. I get that Ms. Duane carefully and meticulously divorces the structure from the Earthly Church, but the whole Adversary/Lightbringer/Serpent/Temptation/Choice/Sacrifice shtick is clearly lifted straight from the Eve-Serpent story. I'm exhausted by the fact that so many magic n
—Amanda
