RogerBW's Blog

Deep Wizardry, Diane Duane 20 April 2026

1985 fantasy for children (and everyone else), second of its series. Nita and Kit are on a family holiday on Long Island, when a whale-wizard in distress invites them into a great ritual…

This starts as a simple tale of sneaking away from the family to do magic, but there is real peril here. Kit and Nita are young, but the youngest wizards are the ones with most power even if they haven't fully learned how to use it, so they land the hardest jobs.

But some of the peril comes simply from not checking exactly what is required of you, when everyone thinks you must already know. And so we end up with a child preparing for death. Which is the sort of thing must authors wouldn't put in a book for children, or at least they'd make it all simple and obvious, but Duane is actually good at this and so her moral dilemmas are always real.

Which is not to say that the Master-Shark may not simply end your distress in the most practical way.

This is how to do a book with a moral. Other authors, pay attention.

Previous in series: So You Want To Be a Wizard | Series: Young Wizards

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