You could go by any one of them and even stop and talk to them and they would seem perfectly ordinary, but they are not. In So You Want to Be a Wizard, by Diana Duane, Nita Callahan is running away from bullies. She darts to the one place she has always felt safe, the library. While hiding in there she is strangely snagged by a book. It is one of those “So You Want to Be a …” books, So You Want to Be a Doctor … So you want to Be a Pilot … a Nurse … a Lawyer and so on. This one said So You Want to Be a Wizard. At first she thinks, “ This has to be a joke.” After she takes the wizard’s oath though her life is turned around as she takes on the responsibilities of the learn as you go job of a wizard.

Nita meets Kit Rodriguez, another novice wizard, and the two become best of friends. With her new found power she also stands up to the bullies. Life is getting better and better that is until her wizard ordeal starts. An ordeal is a test every wizard must take. Some do not survive the fight against the Powers of Darkness and die, but many do. In Nita and Kit’s ordeal they must travel to an alternate dark ominous Manhattan, fight man-eating helicopters, avoid the vicious taxis, and make a deal with an old dragon to retrieve the Book of Night with Moon, which is the secret to preserving the Universe.

As a child Diana was always just out of the reach of Manhattan. Her parents told her she could not go there to play until she grew up. She though wanted to investigate all the mysterious in the big city like dragons in the sewers. When she was twenty-five she finally got her chance. After the two years in the city Diana wrote So You Want to Be a Wizard explaining about how she really would of liked to “play” in the city.

So You Want to Be a Wizard ditches the pixie dust, quill pens, and bat blood. It is wizardry in present day. Readers love this book because it brings science with magic. No longer can things just pop out of nowhere leaving you confused on how something like that can happen. It actually abide by the law of conservation, energy can not be created or destroyed only transferred, and instead of making us skeptics with questions it makes us believers. If you are someone looking to escape from this world So You Want to Be a Wizard is the book for you.