Rating: 
Summary: [Insert positive adjective here]!
Review: (Me have limited vocabulary for describing excellence without sounding repetitive).I was impatient to get this book and get my Wizardry fix. So when I finally got my hands on it, I read it as fast as I could. The idea is brilliant and it becomes obvious to the reader that Miss Duane has plans for her universe. Her characters are evolving and it is this that makes them real to the reader. Anyone can pick up this series casually, but by the time they get to this book (for the slow ones ;) they will be more than casual readers -- they will be drawn into Miss Duane's universe happily and readily.
Rating:
Summary: [Insert positive adjective here]!
Review: (Me have limited vocabulary for describing excellence without sounding repetitive). I was impatient to get this book and get my Wizardry fix. So when I finally got my hands on it, I read it as fast as I could. The idea is brilliant and it becomes obvious to the reader that Miss Duane has plans for her universe. Her characters are evolving and it is this that makes them real to the reader. Anyone can pick up this series casually, but by the time they get to this book (for the slow ones ;) they will be more than casual readers -- they will be drawn into Miss Duane's universe happily and readily.
Rating: 
Summary: The Story Rolls On!
Review: A Wizard Alone is the delightful continuation of the SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD series. This is young adult fiction at its best! It is a wonderful romp through magic and wizardry with the same characters that readers have grown to love in the last five installments. The great thing about these books is the way Ms. Duane has woven reality in with her fantasy world. In these books people live real lives and sometimes die real deaths and the survivors have to deal with these realities. Magic can't replace a mother who is lost forever but friends and relatives can help with loving support. Part of this segment deals with Nita's loss and her struggle to win through the pain, another is Kit and Ponch furthering their own unique relationship as they delve into the mind of an autistic proto-wizard. Great story, great writing! Highly recommended for the youth of all ages. Be aware that reading the first five books is not actually required but highly recommended if you want to get the full flavor of the continuing story. Highly Recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Life Goes On, Especially For Wizards
Review: A Wizard Alone is the sixth novel in the Young Wizards series, following The Wizard's Dilemma. In the previous volume, Nita's mother is diagnosed with a brain tumor and Nita searches for some way to cure the illness using wizardry, but to no avail. The Lone Power tries to tempt her into a pact, but Nita's mother herself intervenes to help Nita to deny the enemy. During this time, Kit is mostly ignored by Nita and spends his time observing his dog, Ponch, who is displaying remarkable abilities, including talents for walking between dimensions and for finding things. In this book, Tom offers Kit an assignment to discover why a promising youngster, Darryl, hasn't completed his ordeal after three months. Normally young wizard candidates are left alone during their ordeal, but this candidate is unusual in that he is autistic, so his mental condition may have caused some hang-up. Tom wants Kit to only observe and interfere as little as possible. Kit watches Darryl at school from a distance at first, but soon he and Ponch slip into the classroom with an invisibility spell and Ponch helps Kit to get into Darryl's private universe. There they discover that Darryl seems to be perfectly normal in most respects, but is having encounter after encounter with the Lone Power. Kit also senses that Darryl has passed his ordeal some time ago, but doesn't know it. Moreover, this incarnation of the Lone Power seems to be frustrated for some reason. Nita is having a hard time keeping her family from falling apart from grief after her mother's death, yet the struggle is helping her to keep herself functional. Initially her father hated to go to bed alone and now he hates to wake up in the bed alone. Her sister, Dairine, hates to go to school and face the pity of her peers. Everything reminds them of the missing member of the family. Nita is meeting regularly with a school counselor and benefiting from the chance to talk about her grief as well as some specific words of advice. Dairine, however, has been assigned a newly graduated counselor who apparently has expunged all memories of childhood and adolescent from her brain. When Kit tries asks for her help as backup, Nita demurs since she is very uncertain of her stability at that moment. Nevertheless, Nita is having a series of strange dreams that appear to have something to do with Darryl. Then Nita tries to contact Kit, but he is unavailable at the moment; apparently he is in another universe at that time, so Nita reckons that he is walking the dimensions looking for Darryl. However, when Nita learns that Kit had traveled to Darryl's private universe in his sleep, she begins to worry that Kit is being overcome by Darryl's unusual powers and makes arrangements with Ponch -- the dog is able to talk to her telepathically -- to be notified the next time Kit visits Darryl. However, Kit is pulled away suddenly and Ponch barely has time to go with him. This novel is another tale filled with real life concerns and relationships, especially between these young wizards and their respective sisters; I particularly enjoyed Carmela's reaction to the alien shopping channel on the magically enhanced TV. However, the wizardry is an integral part of the story; only a wizard could visit Darryl in his universe -- i.e., mind -- and probably only a wizard would have the strength and talents to create a normal enclave within his own autistic brain. Recommended for Duane fans and anyone who enjoys young people discovering the universe, especially in a magical setting.
Rating:
Summary: She doesn't disappoint
Review: Diane Duane's continuing Young Wizards series is without a doubt one of the finest young adult fantasy series out there. While in some senses less dark than some of the others, A Wizard Alone serves up some of Duane's most complex writing and story-building thus far. Definitely a winner.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but not great
Review: I have come to expect a lot from Duane's wizard series. Every book has been original and special in their own unique ways, but this one seemed to lack something, as other reviewers have mentioned. In my opinion, it was the same thing over and over. Kit encounters Darryl, drains his energy, acts differently. Nita meets up with a clown,or a robot, or whatever it happens to be in her sleep... over and over. Maybe this book was simply a stepping stone for Nita to recover from her mothers death?
Another thing is, every book I'm hoping that Nita and Kit will become aware of feelings between eachother. Maybe a good A Wizard in Love book would do the trick? =)
Overall, this book was definately worth the read, but could have been maximized to something a bit more above the bar her previous books have raised.
Rating:
Summary: Mixed feelings - good but not perfect.
Review: I have loved the Young Wizard series since the first one. The first one grabbed me with its vision and breadth in the same way that the first Harry Potter book did. I often recommend the series to people who love Harry Potter, and are looking for something to fill the gap waiting for the next book. Duane's wizard world background is deeper and richer that that of Potter, and the story telling is more sophisticated in some ways. Yet she doesn't quite hit some of the things that have made Potter so popular - my own opinion, which I rarely see anyone else express, is that the Potter books are actually fairly good mysteries. The Potter books combine the schoolboy charm of Kipling's *Stalkey & Co.* stories with Boys' Own Adventures and Hardy Boys mysteries. Duane goes a bit more for straight plot suspense/action. One of the deep elements Duane has is a vision and concept of the universe, and the need to slow entropy, that is used in various ways in many of her works, not just the Young Wizards. But the bottom line is, as much as I like Harry Potter, I would rather that the Young Wizards universe turned out to be the one we actually live in. Given that background, how do I feel that this book compares? The concept is there but I have some reservations. Whereas in the the last book, her characters journeyed into multiple universes, only to wind up within the universe of a single body - in this book, even though Duane's characters play around in different universes, they are ultimately the created universes of a single mind. As another reviewer says, this book explores the characters of Kit and Nita more deeply. This makes sense as well - they are growing older, and they themselves have developed more. There is more maturity in their actions, even though they are still learning. They have lost a little bit of their own innocence, but gained strength; and their efforts are again trying to protect our own universe. The Lone Power shows up, as usual - but he seems oddly limited compared to the Star-Snuffing threat he has been in the past. Is he already changing? or... well, as I titled this review- mixed feelings - good but not perfect. The plot of this book is interesting as usual, and explores the concept of autism and how austistic children see themselves and the world around them - or refuse to see it. Duane's own nursing background shows up a bit in the explanations and in the character of Kit's mother. Yet the whole book leaves me mildly unsatisfied compared to the others. For one thing, all the previous books have ended with a sacrifice, and a feeling of sadness, countered by the feeling that something good has been bought by that suffering. This one feels more like the Lone Power has simply been outwitted by a clever trick; and the sadness in the book is left over from the previous one, rather than arousing your sympathy from a new sacrifice. Overall I had a feeling of 'rush' - as if this book should have gone through another rewrite, and more development before it was released. Usually the trick in writing is to reduce things that have too much in them - this book feels like it needs to be the 'director's edition', not the 'released edition'. It is STILL very good on its own - yet that 'hasty' feeling, and sense of being somewhat underdeveloped, is what drives my rating. Another thing Duane does is include subtle references in her books. I suspect that the counsellor that Nita is seeing to help her through her grief, is such a reference. But I seemed to find fewer such references in this book - again, giving a feeling of incompleteness. She has great skill in interweaving them, and they are rarely so obvious as in the last book - yet the details they have added in the other books are missing in this one, also contributing to it seeming more sparse and less complete. It also struck me that the special characteristics of Darryl, the autistic new wizard on Ordeal, reminded me of something.... and I scarcely had to dig around in my memory to identify what. It almost seems as if this story is meant as a conceptual reply to Ursula K. LeGuin's short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". Perhaps Duane did not do that consciously - but the comparison immediately leaped to mind. It would be interesting to pair that story and this novel as assigned reading, and ask a class to write an essay. The bottom line is that this book is clearly a part of the series -but I feel it is the least satisfying. It is clear that she has more to say - there is foreshadowing of more development to come with Kit's dog Ponch -and I look forward to seeing the next volume - but I say "don't rush it". This very worthwhile series deserves her full attention and development - and deserves greater popularity and advertising too, publisher! And we DO want more.
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but missing that essential "magic"
Review: I have very mixed feelings about this book. Diane Duane is of course a great author and everything she writes is well worth reading. That said, I really didn't find myself enthralled by this book as I have by others in the Young Wizards series. It was a good enough read and I enjoyed it. But that essential "magic" that sets it apart from the average fantasy book was somehow missing.
My personal hunch is that the series has just gone on too long. The first three books were amazing, mind-expanding, earth-shattering high fantasy at its best. Here we had a couple of teenagers pitted against the evil Lone Power, and the fate of the world, New York, or the entire universe at stake. These books were exciting, enthralling cliffhangers that you just couldn't put down. Even now, chills go up and down my spine when I read certain parts of Deep Wizardry (probably my favorite in the series.) The first three books culminated in the defeat and redemption of the Lone Power at the end of High Wizardry.
The mistake, I think, was in continuing the series. After High Wizardry, the "high fantasy" aspects of the books began to disappear, which was quite understandable. I mean, how much further could Duane possibly go in that direction after the epic battle between Dairine and the Lone Power at the end of High Wizardry? (A Wizard Abroad attempted to retain the "epic" character of the previous three, and did not succeed, IMHO.) Instead, Duane had her characters turn inward, dealing with themselves and the issues in their own lives instead of saving the universe. The fifth and sixth books are very introspective, and as character-development novels they are very interesting. However, as fantasy they are lacking that essential tension that characterized the first three books. In High Wizardry, the fate of the universe was at stake; in Wizard's Dilemma, it's the fate of Nita's mother. (Not to say that this isn't important in its own way -- it just doesn't create the same atmosphere of nervous excitement.) In the first book of the series, the characters explore an alternate universe; in the sixth book, they spend most of the time in a single person's mind. The focus of the series has shifted from the macroscopic, cosmic, and epic, to the microscopic, introspective, and personal. And while nothing is wrong with this in itself, it's not what I look for in a fantasy book.
Another problem is that not as many new ideas are being introduced. In the first three books, the characters were still discovering their own magic and all its aspects. There was an atmosphere of exciting discovery. In this last book, however, the characters have adopted a "been there, done that" attitude to magic. Magic has become routine and predictable; while in the first two books the characters were out discovering new universes, here Kit uses his skills to...fix his VCR by persuading it to work with his TV. (Yawn.) Magic somehow just isn't *magic* anymore...
In summary, though this book is a good piece of writing, it is somehow missing that essential spark that would give it life, like the "dragon's eye" mentioned in the Wizard's Dilemma. However, the book is well worth reading and was highly interesting in several ways (such as its portrayal of an autistic child) if not as exciting as I hoped.
Rating:
Summary: Wizard Alone
Review: I read the first 5 books in this series and thought they were really good; especially the 5th one so I was pretty excited to get this one.
If you ask me, A Wizard Alone is without a doubt the best book in this series so far. Actually, it's probably one of the greatest books of all time. It's really funny, something the other books weren't, and it has an awesome plot. READ THIS BOOK!!!
Rating:
Summary: Emotional and insightful. Highly recommended!
Review: I read this book as an unabridged audiobook not realizing I was diving headfirst into a long running series. Despite my complete lack of knowledge about the previous five books events my enjoyment of the book wasn't lessoned by bouts of confusion which says a lot for the talent of the author. Yeah, there were a few gaps here and there but nothing I couldn't get past or figure out by continuing to read along. Kit Rodriquez is a young wizard (as I'm sure most of you know), who along with his talking dog Ponch, are attempting to figure out why it is taking so long for a potential wizard to complete his Ordeal (something that must be done, apparently, before he can become a full blown wizard). As they investigate and eventually enter the boys' mind, Kit learns that Darryl is autistic and witness shocking moments of violence upon the young defenseless boy that are perpetrated by The Lone Power. Both Kit and Ponch, especially, are shocked and determined to reach the boy, even if it means entering strange and dangerous worlds inside Darryl's mind. Kit's best friend and usual partner in wizardry, Nita, has her own set of troubles. The death of her beloved mother has sent her family members and herself into a deep depression. Dad and Nita's sister are having a difficult time getting out of bed and it's up to Nita to keep them moving through life. It's so easy and tempting to drown in sadness, as Nita acknowledges, but she's taken it upon herself to keep her remaining family intact. As if that weren't more than enough to bear, she's also been plagued by some very odd dreams involving clowns. Eventually her dreams get her involved with Kit's current dilemma with The Lone Power and Darryl. This book was great from beginning to end. The plot was interesting and it was a tremendously emotional read. Nita's grief and efforts to keep plodding through life with the glimmer that maybe someday things wouldn't hurt quite so much were written with realism. Even Ponch, the dog, has some surprisingly emotional revelations and reactions to the things he's seeing. Kit's a plucky young character who is easy to like but it's strong and insightful Nita's story that will stick with me for some time to come. There's also enough humor mixed in to prevent the story from becoming overly gloomy. I particularly enjoyed Ponce's take on things and Kit's interactions with a prickly DVD player and an antagonistic TV. I'm definitely going to locate the other books in the series to catch up on what I've missed.
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