So You Want to Be a Wizard

The first book in Diane Duane's Young Wizards series introduces 13-year-old Nita Callahan, a bookish girl on Long Island regularly tormented by a bully named Joanne Virella and her gang. Fleeing to the local library after a confrontation, Nita discovers an unfamiliar book titled So You Want to Be a Wizard. Its foreword explains that wizardry is a real art centered on a magical language called the Speech, which can describe and alter reality. Wizardry's purpose is to slow entropy, the gradual dying of the Universe, a force introduced by a being called the Lone Power. The book warns that taking the Wizards' Oath commits one to a lifelong pursuit and that an ordeal will follow. Nita borrows the book, but Joanne's group ambushes her on the way home, beating her and stealing her prized space pen. That night, Nita reads the Oath aloud, pledging to use the Art only in the service of Life. Nothing dramatic happens, but the next morning she finds her name in the book's directory of wizards, confirming she has become a novice.

Nita studies the manual in the woods, and its first exercise causes her to hear the trees speaking in the Speech. A crabapple tree tells her another wizard is working nearby, and Nita finds Kit Rodriguez, a boy slightly younger than her who is also bullied. Kit has been attempting a power spell but cannot complete it alone. They combine their spells, and the magic transports their awareness to a dark, distorted vision of Manhattan under a gray sky, where a malevolent presence detects them. In desperation, Kit opens a hole in the spell, and a being falls through with them: Fred, a sentient white hole of stellar mass who keeps most of his bulk elsewhere through a space-time warp. Fred reports that the Book of Night with Moon, a text written in the Speech that describes everything in existence, has gone missing. Fred needs to find an Advisory wizard, an experienced practitioner who guides and assists others. Kit and Nita agree to help in exchange for Fred's assistance.

Fred retrieves Nita's pen from Joanne at school but accidentally swallows it, causing him to malfunction and emit random objects. They visit the local Advisory wizards, Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, who grow serious upon learning the bright Book is missing: Senior wizards must periodically read from it to preserve reality, and its disappearance empowers its dark counterpart, the Book Which Is Not Named. Carl fixes Fred but explains the pen must be retrieved using a worldgate at Grand Central Station. He provides a "timeslide," a piece of purchased time allowing them to spend a day in the city unnoticed. Tom and Carl's macaw, Picchu, who can tell the future, delivers a cryptic warning: "Don't be afraid to make corrections. Don't be afraid to lend a hand. And don't look down."

During the week, Nita prepares supplies and visits the rowan tree in her backyard, Liused, who drops a branch for her and tells her about the ancient Battle of the Trees, when plants fought to make the world habitable for humans. On Saturday, Kit and Nita take the train to Manhattan with Fred. Kit carries a broken-off car antenna from his father's old Edsel; he has awakened the metal's memory of its forging, giving it potential as a weapon. At Grand Central, they find the worldgate displaced by construction, shifted 70 stories up. After Fred distracts building security, they ride the elevator to the Pan Am Building's helipad, and Nita builds a transparent walkway of hardened air to the gate. As Nita begins retrieving her pen, perytons, undead wolf-like creatures, charge across the walkway. Nita grabs Kit, leaps through the worldgate, and dissolves the walkway behind them.

They awaken in the dark alternate Manhattan, a sunless city filled with hostile living machines. A helicopter-creature attacks; Nita discovers the rowan wand channels devastating silver moonfire, while Kit fires bolts of forge-light from his antenna. On the streets, predatory cabs hunt without drivers, and Kit is struck by one before Fred deflects the blow. Kit later encounters a wounded Lotus Esprit, a predatory sports car, and removes a strip of chrome from its wheel, an act of kindness that proves significant.

A finding spell reveals they must retrieve the bright Book to survive and escape this world. Nita proposes stealing the dark Book first as a guide. They infiltrate the Lone Power's headquarters, a 90-story black glass skyscraper, where the Lone Power appears as a handsome young businessman. Kit finds the dark Book while the Lone Power is distracted, and they flee. On Fifth Avenue, the grateful Lotus rescues them from predatory cabs and carries them downtown. They descend into an abandoned City Hall subway station, where the bright Book is guarded by the Eldest, a 30-foot fireworm-dragon hoarding treasure underground. Nita negotiates a trade: the dark Book for the bright one. Kit promises to seal the station permanently, and the Eldest accepts. They perform a Moebius spell that twists the station out of alignment with the surrounding world and escape as the tunnels collapse.

Riding the Lotus back to Grand Central, they find the concourse split by a massive crevasse. The Lone Power arrives in his true form, clad in black chain mail astride an eight-legged iron steed. The Lotus charges the steed in a heroic last stand and is destroyed. Kit transforms his antenna into a sword blade spanning the chasm, creating a bridge the Lone Power cannot cross. They race into the tunnels, Kit reads the gate-opening spell, and they leap through the worldgate into their own Manhattan. Kit cannot close the gate behind them.

They flee to Central Park for a final stand. Nita's spell, amplified by the bright Book, uproots the park's trees to form a living palisade. Kit shouts the Mason's Word, a powerful incantation that commands stone and metal, awakening every statue within range. The Lone Power extinguishes the Sun; they have eight minutes before the Moon goes dark and the Book becomes unreadable. Kit reads from the Book, invoking New York in the Speech and holding reality against the darkness. The iron steed smashes through the trees, but equestrian statues throughout the park charge into battle.

When the Moon goes out, Fred flies upward and releases all his mass as energy, sacrificing himself to become a blazing star that reignites the Moon. Nita takes the Book and reads the ancient passage affirming life's presence everywhere. As she reaches the Lone Power's true name, she sees it ends with a closed circle symbolizing an unbreakable cycle of pride and anger. Remembering Picchu's advice, she uses her pen, now transformed by its time inside Fred, to draw an upward-pointing arrow from the circle: the symbol for the possibility of change. She and Kit speak the altered name, making it real.

The Lone Power and his forces vanish. The Sun relights. Fred's star fades, leaving a sky-wide aurora. Kit and Nita activate the timeslide, which sends them back to before their earlier selves reached the rooftop. They silently say goodbye to Fred and catch the train home.

Walking home, Nita encounters Joanne and invites her to look through her telescope. Joanne brushes past, but Nita realizes she has gained what she asked for: the ability to break the cycle of anger and loneliness through the act of reaching out. That night, Nita sits under Liused as Fred's nova blazes in the sky, grieving but at peace. She dreams of Timeheart, an eternal realm where beloved things are preserved in their fullest beauty. There, Fred explains that Nita's change gave the Lone Power back the option to choose differently. Nita wakes the next morning to her younger sister, Dairine, announcing the news, and goes to breakfast, a wizard resuming ordinary life.