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Cathleen (USA: PA) (2007/01/22):
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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. From School Library Journal
Gr 6-8-Now 14, Nita bemoans the fact that she "kept running into problems for which wizardry either wasn't an answer, or else was the wrong one. And even when it was the right answer, it never seemed to be a simple one anymore." School is harder than ever before, and her wizarding partnership with her best friend, Kit, has been under stress, when the ultimate blow comes: her mother has intractable brain cancer. As in earlier books in the series, wizardry is an unusual hybrid of science fiction and fantasy conventions, in which interplanetary aliens and parallel uni-verses coexist with spells and talking trees. In this installment, the two friends each face a dilemma: Kit finds he can retreat forever into his own self-created heaven, but at the cost of giving up the fight against evil. Nita learns she can cure her mother's cancer, but only by sacrificing her powers to the Lone One, the source of all unhappiness in the universe. As the maturing wizards learn in the story's moving conclusion, there are no simple answers to decisions like these. A well-crafted plot, occasional dry humor, and appealing main characters will make this novel popular with readers new to the series as well as with Duane's fans.
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