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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Taking a break from wizardry?, 3 Jul 2005
"'Aunt Annie, who were all those people out there with the horses?...The hooves were right outside my door, but when I looked, they'd gone away. Didn't take them long,' she added.
Aunt Annie looked at her again as she came over and put Nita's teacup down. Her expression was rather different this time. 'Oh,' she said. 'You mean the ghosts.'
Nita stared.
'Welcome to Ireland,' said her aunt."
- tea with the Callahan familyAt a minimum, read SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD (which introduces Nita, Kit, and to a lesser extent Nita's sister Dairine) and HIGH WIZARDRY (which further develops Dairine) before tackling this book. If you haven't read them yet, shoo. Unlike several of the later Young Wizards books, in A WIZARD ABROAD only Nita Callahan is a viewpoint character, for the very good reason that her parents are behaving as one might expect good parents of a fourteen-year-old wizard to behave. They're worried about this magic thing, worried that their daughter has a very close relationship with a boy her own age (Kit, her partner in wizardry), and they want Nita and Kit to take a break from each other. In short, they're packing Nita off to her aunt in Ireland for the summer, after extracting a promise that Nita won't use any transport spells to visit Kit on the sly. (In my perhaps jaded opinion, the wizardry isn't the most fantastic element about the story. That honour goes to Nita getting a passport without her having a great deal more advance notice about the situation. A close second would be that Nita's parents don't telephone her regularly.) The point that Nita can't at first make clear to her parents is that the Oath is for life, and she'll still be a wizard in Ireland just as much as if she were back home in Nassau County. The point that Nita herself has overlooked is that her wizardry comes from her father's side of the family, which makes staying with his sister more interesting than anticipated. :) And taking a break from Kit - though not quite as her parents had in mind - does have some effects, since Nita now has a chance to work with different wizards near her own age. Like its predecessor, DEEP WIZARDRY, this entry in the series explores how wizards who don't come from Nita's particular background may interact with their wizardry differently (as well as, of course, a dire emergency coming up; being a wizard is analogous to being a fire-fighter that way, in that emergencies are a way of life). As with the whale-wizards of the ocean, Irish wizards don't use a manual in book form, but rather have a more bardic tradition of carrying magic in memory. They've also got different problems than wizards in the New World do, the equivalent of magical toxic waste having accumulated from many centuries of magic use and sharing the land with the Fair Folk, non-humans who have their own traditions. This volume may require some mental adjustments on the reader's part, since a certain amount of Gaelic dialogue happens, as well as Irish legends being filled in by stories-within-a-story.
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