Nita Callahan is at the end of her rope because of the bullies who've been hounding her at school... until she discovers a mysterious library book that promises her the chance to become a wizard. But she has no idea of the difference that taking the Wizard's Oath is going to make in her life. Shortly, in company with fellow beginner-wizard Kit Rodriguez, Nita's catapulted into what will be the adventure of a lifetime—if she and Kit can both live through it. For every wizard's career starts with an Ordeal in which he or she must challenge the one power in the universe that hates wizardry more than anything else: the Lone Power that invented death and turned it loose in the worlds. Plunged into a dark and deadly alternate New York full of the Lone One's creatures, Kit and Nita must venture into the very heart of darkness to find the stolen, legendary Book of Night with Moon. Only with the dangerous power of the wizardly Book do they have a chance to save not just their own lives, but their world...

What's supposed to be just a plain old summer vacation—swim, sand, and sun—takes a turn for the magical when Nita and Kit come to the aid of a fellow wizard. Only, this wizard is a whale, and she needs the two teens to join a group of whales and dolphins in an ancient underwater ritual. But performing the Song of the Twelve is not easy—and there are things in the ocean more dangerous than even the Lone Power, such as the enormous Master Shark. He is as old as the sea and has his own role in the Song of the Twelve, a role that requires only that he do what he's best at…eat someone.

Nita's bratty little sister Dairine, 10, is too smart and powerful for a new wizard. Her computerized wizard manual glibly sends her off on her novice Ordeal. Kit and Nita chase her across the galaxy, trying to catch up before she gets into trouble so deep that not even her brains can rescue her.

To give Nita a vacation from magic—and to separate her from Kit, her partner in wizardry—Nita's parents pack her off for a monthlong stay with her eccentric aunt in Ireland. But the Old World is even more steeped in magical doings than the United States, and Nita soon finds herself and a host of Irish wizards battling creatures from a nightmare Ireland—a realm where humankind is the stuff of tales and storybooks, and where the legends and monsters of Irish mythology are a deadly reality. So much for vacation abroad....

Not everything can be fixed with magic—teenage angst, for example. Young wizards Kit and Nita are having such a tough time coping with adolescence that they go their separate ways. Neither wants to call it a breakup, but that's what it seems to be. Heartsick, they throw themselves into their magical studies. But Nita's work is cut short by bad news: Her mother has cancer, and it looks incurable—by medical or magical means. Even wizardry is powerless against cancer. The situation looks hopeless . . . until Nita enters a Faustian bargain with the Lone Power, the source of all death in the universe, the one evil that Nita has dedicated her life to fighting.

While Nita grieves over her mother's death, Kit tackles a challenge as dangerous as it is Rescue a young wizard who has vanished on his first assignment. This new wizard is unlike any other—he's autistic and he's a magical prodigy. His power is enormous. Now Kit and his dog, Ponch, must track down the missing boy before the Lone Power finds him.

Rest and relaxation—that's what Nita thinks she's going to get when she and her partner-wizard Kit go on a wizardly "cultural exchange" program. But nothing about wizardry—not even vacation—is ever quite that simple!

Nita and Kit return from their wizardly holiday, looking forward to getting back to their everyday routine. But there's trouble brewing. A strange darkness of the mind and heart is about to befall the older wizards of the world, stealing away their power. Soon, the young wizards of Earth and many other planets find themselves forced to defend wizards and nonwizards alike against an invasion of a kind they've never imagined. But mere defense won't be enough to combat the evil afoot. With their alien teammates, Nita, Kit, and Dairine must race to search worlds known and unknown for the secret weapon the Powers That Be have promised them—before the minions of the sinister Lone Power find it first. And then, for the first time in millenia, the wizards must go to war...

In the hotly anticipated ninth installment of the Young Wizards series, Kit and Nita become part of an elite team investigating the mysterious “message in a bottle,” which holds the first clues to the secrets of the long-lost inhabitants of Mars. But not even wizardry can help them cope with the strange events that unfold when the “bottle” is uncorked and a life form from another era emerges. Though the Martians seem friendly, they have a plan that could change the shape of more than one world. As the shadow of interplanetary war stretches over both worlds, Kit and Nita must fight to master the strange and ancient synergy binding them to Mars and its last inhabitants. If they don’t succeed, the history that left Mars lifeless will repeat itself on Earth.

Just another Hallowe'en in the Young Wizards universe... In this 14,000-word novelette, written for UNICEF's 60th annual "Trick or Treat for UNICEF" campaign, we tag along with Nita Callahan, Kit Rodriguez, Ronan Nolan, and Dairine Callahan as they do a little overage Trick or Treating in their own neighborhood, and find themselves going up against an old adversary with a peculiar new ally...

It’s five days till Christmas, and the day before the Winter Solstice. The biggest pre-Christmas blizzard seen for decades is heading straight for the New York metropolitan area. But in one small corner of the Town of Hempstead, everyone’s attention is on other business. That’s because there’s a party tonight at Juan and Marina Rodriguez’s house… and the guest of honor is a being from four hundred lightyears away who looks a whole lot like a Christmas tree. As so often happens, the motive force behind the festivities is the redoubtable Carmela Rodriguez, intent on fulfilling her longtime intention to fulfill one of the great wishes of the wizard known as Filif—specifically, to finally get him into a full set of Christmas decorations. The two-day party that ensues (with an epic sleepover in the middle) brings together a cast of old and new friends to eat, drink, exchange presents, and see a few things the likes of which this world has never seen before… This 35,000 word novelette is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and takes place between the events of A Wizard of Mars and the forthcoming Games Wizards Play.

When the renowned saurian Species Archivist to the Powers that Be summons young wizard Kit Rodriguez to participate in an urgent off-planet intervention intended to save many millions of lives, Kit’s hardly going to say “no.” He soon discovers that not only he, but his wizardly partner Nita Callahan and her sister Dairine, his friend Ronan Nolan, and tens of thousands of other wizards from Earth have also been drafted in to intervene on the distant world called Tevaral. There the planet’s single huge moon Thesba has become tectonically unstable and will very soon tear itself apart, its massive fragments smashing down onto the surface of Tevaral and utterly destroying it. The wizards’ mission: to extract Tevaral’s hominid population and “raft” them off-planet to new homeworlds before the apocalyptic disaster begins. There’s only one problem: the people of Tevaral don’t want to go. Kit, Nita and their thousands of fellow Earth wizards must now race against time to find a way to save the Tevaralti despite their near-symbiotic relationship with their beloved world and its unique life forms. As doomsday inexorably draws nearer, hope is fading fast, and it seems like it’s going to take a miracle to keep the people of Tevaral from being wiped out. True, wizardry is all about miracles. But will one turn up in time?

Every eleven years, Earth's senior wizards hold the Invitational: an intensive three-week event where the planet's newest, sharpest young wizards show off their best and hottest spells. Wizardly partners Kit Rodriguez and Nita Callahan, and Nita's sister, former wizard-prodigy Dairine Callahan, are drafted in to mentor two brilliant and difficult cases: for Nita and Kit, there’s Penn Shao-Feng, a would-be sun technician with a dangerous new take on managing solar weather; and for Dairine, there's shy young Mehrnaz Farrahi, an Iranian wizard-girl trying to specialize in defusing earthquakes while struggling with a toxic extended wizardly family that demands she perform to their expectations. Together they're plunged into a whirlwind of cutthroat competition and ruthless judging. Penn's egotistical attitude toward his mentors complicates matters as the pair tries to negotiate their burgeoning romance. Meanwhile, Dairine struggles to stabilize her hero-worshipping, insecure protégée against the interference of powerful relatives using her to further their own tangled agendas. When both candidates make it through to the finals stage on the dark side of the Moon, they and their mentors are flung into a final conflict that could change the solar system for the better . . . or damage Earth beyond even wizardly repair.

A wizard's Ordeal is intensely personal, and sometimes (though not always) intensely dangerous. Each Ordeal is tailored to the wizard who may pass it, or fail to pass. Each one is in some ways diagnostic of the innermost nature of the wizard who embraces the challenge offered them by the Powers that Be. On Ordeal tells the unique tales of the wizardly initiations of three notable wizards of the Young Wizards universe—Roshaun ke Nelaid, Mamvish fsh Wimsih, and Ronan Nolan Jnr—revealing how they coped with their Ordeals. Watch as a disaffected alien prince, a lizard who wants to become a wizard (by having one for dinner if necessary), and an ironically emo kid from the Dublin suburbs get to grips, up close and personal, with the Powers that Be... and come into the kind of power only those on errantry can dream of. Among them, these three epic tales of three very different introductions to the world of wizardry comprise a total of 127,000 words of new, canonical Young Wizards material.

Tonight's the night when the famous Rockefeller Center Christmas tree is about to be lit in an elaborate ceremony in midtown Manhattan. Like everything else in the COVID-stricken world of 2020, this tree lighting has been forced to differ from all the others that have preceded it. But there's another reason this particular lighting ceremony will be unique. This tree is the one in which the tiny saw-whet owl the media christened "Rocky" was discovered, trapped, when the tree was set up two weeks ago. The humans who helped "Rocky" and released her back into the wild had no idea of the forces about to be unleashed on New York City. For the one thing they couldn't give the owl was the one thing she wanted most: her tree. As a result, she's been forced to take matters into her own claws. And it's going to take a crack team of New York's best and smartest wizards to keep the ensuing events from destabilizing the whole planet... This 25,000 word novella is a canonical work in the Young Wizards universe and is set in the revised New Millennium Editions YW timeline.

"This trio of magical adventures, wizardry proves as good as its words" a Guild America collection of three books by Diane Duane.

Book club collection of So You Want to Be a Wizard; Deep Wizardry; High Wizardry; A Wizard Abroad; The Wizard's Dilemma. Long before there was Harry Potter, there was Nita Callahan and her friend Kit. Nita doesn't have a highly significant scar on her forehead, nor does she live with abusive adoptive parents. She's a perfectly ordinary girl living with her perfectly amiable family (well, her younger sister, Dairine, is impossible, but that's the way younger sisters are) on Long Island, where she goes to public school and has problems with the class bully. Then one day she runs across one of those little books that help young people decide on a career: So You Want To Be a Doctor; So You Want To Be a Plumber; So You Want To Be a Wizard... Nita can't resist. She takes it home; she studies it; she recites the Wizard's Oath she finds inside—and she finds herself launched on a whole series of dangerously magical adventures. They take her to the depths of the ocean, to the moon and beyond, and to other dimensions entirely. She meets and befriends (and sometimes does battle with) wizards of all sorts and species. And every so often she, Kit and Dairine save the universe.