The Wizard's Dilemma
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Diane Duane |
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| Subtitle | Book 5 in the Young Wizards Series |
| Publisher | Harcourt Children's Books |
| Honors | |
| Not everything can be fixed with magic—teenage angst, for example. Young wizards Kit and Nita are having such a tough time coping with adolescence that they go their separate ways. Neither wants to call it a breakup, but that’s what it seems to be. Heartsick, they throw themselves into their magical studies.
But Nita’s work is cut short by bad news: Her mother has cancer, and it looks incurable—by medical or magical means. Even wizardry is powerless against cancer. The situation looks hopeless…until Nita enters a Faustian bargain with the Lone Power, the… | |
Not everything can be fixed with magic—teenage angst, for example. Young wizards Kit and Nita are having such a tough time coping with adolescence that they go their separate ways. Neither wants to call it a breakup, but that’s what it seems to be. Heartsick, they throw themselves into their magical studies.
But Nita’s work is cut short by bad news: Her mother has cancer, and it looks incurable—by medical or magical means. Even wizardry is powerless against cancer.
The situation looks hopeless…until Nita enters a Faustian bargain with the Lone Power, the source of all death in the universe, the one evil that Nita has dedicated her life to fighting.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
The fifth title in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series delves deeper into an emotional landscape than any of her previous books (So You Want to Be a Wizard, Deep Wizardry, High Wizardry, and A Wizard Abroad). For the first time ever, friends and wizard partners Nita and Kit seem to be having trouble communicating. They argue over a spell to clean up the pollution in New York’s Jones Inlet, and from that point on, they can’t connect on anything. Is it adolescence that’s tearing them apart or something more profound? Meanwhile, Nita and her family are stunned to discover that her mother has cancer, and there’s a possibility that nothing—not surgery, not even wizardry—can fight it. Nita refuses to let her mom go down without a fight, however, and soon she’s on a mission that brings her face-to-face with the Lone Power, source of all death in the universe—Nita’s worst enemy, and possibly her only hope.
Impressive in its scope, The Wizard’s Dilemma, like all the titles in Duane’s series, is packed with an intriguing combination of technology and magic that fans of fantasy, science fiction, technology, and even Christian literature will find absolutely gripping. Nita is a complex character, as befits her status as a teenager, not to mention a wizard. Her confusion and self-doubt will be painfully believable to every reader. There are no simple answers in this remarkably philosophical novel. (Ages 12 and older) —Emilie Coulter
