History Literature / YoungWizards

* ''Not On My Patch'' - It's Halloween, a day where many wizards can get away with flaunting a little magic in the open, and after what had been a rough year, Nita, Dairine and her Dad decide to have a proper Halloween celebration. It's fallen to Nita to carve the pumpkin...a rather misshapen specimen her father brought home. She ends up having a philosophical discussion with the pumpkin about its opinion on the matter, and then in a bout of odd sentimentality, decides to bring it with her trick-or-treating. Joined by Kit and Ronan, they hit the streets and visit Tom and Carl's neighborhood haunted house. All and all, a great evening, until the pumpkin starts feeling something very wrong happening in its home patch...
* ''How Lovely Are Thy Branches: A Young Wizards Christmas'' - Thanks to a record-breaking blizzard, a two-day party (including epic sleepover) takes place at the Rodriguez house, during which Carmela finally manages to grant a long-held wish of her best wizardly friend, the tree-shaped Filif, by getting him fully decked out in Christmas decorations.
* ''Lifeboats'' - Kit, Nita, Dairine and Rolan (among others) are called upon for an emergency evacuation of an entire alien race to new planets, because their moon is about to break up and the pieces will crash into the planet, in full-blown ''Armageddon'' style. Problem is, millions of the aliens almost inexplicably don't want to leave even in the face of unavoidable death and no one truly understands why. Kit, meanwhile, is fretting about Valentine's Day and even a race to save a world isn't enough to get it off his mind.

* ''Uptown Local'' (1986) - Set shortly after ''So You Want To Be A Wizard''. Kit and Nita are bored and pester Tom for entertainment: he sends them off to go ride the New York subway. Actually, several New York's subways.

* ''Owl Be Home For Christmas'' (2020) - The true story of the saw-whet owl that was found in the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in 2020 and how it rescued its tree.

* AlwaysIdenticalTwins :Averted with the only twins mentioned, Tran Liem Tuyet and Tram Hung Nguyet (boy and girl respectively).

** Also the fate of [[spoiler: The Lone Power]] in ''A Wizard Alone'' when [[spoiler: Darryl traps it in his mind world with his autistic self.]]

* AnyoneCanDie: And they probably will, if they have a nickname. (Lampshaded in the short story "Not On My Patch", where Kit questions if it's really a good idea for Nita to nickname her jack'o'lantern.) This could get interesting seeing that in Games Wizards Play, Nita gave [[spoiler: Jupiter]] a nickname.

-->'' Those who will, \\
The Powers lead; \\
and Those who won't\\
They drag.''

* MagicalComputer: Literally; though Nita and Kit have book-form Manuals and the animals tend to listen to the ocean or wind or whatever, some of the newer human wizards have their manual in laptop or iPod form (a UsefulNotes/{{Mac}} laptop no less, coincidentally. In-universe, the wizards designing the electronic manuals to resemble Macs because of the symbolism of having their logos be [[RuleOfSymbolism an apple without a bite out of it.]] (Think Adam and Eve, and the theme of a species' Choice to accept the Lone Power's "gift" of entropy.) Out of universe, Duane just really likes Apple products (though the YW wiki maintains Windows and Android versions of the manual are being developed.)

** Exists on both sides of the wizards vs Lone Power battles. The Lone Power, who exists outside of time, has already been redeemed, but its shadows still crop up. The wizards know that beating him in linear time won't make a knowable difference while the Lone Power knows it will ultimately lose and be redeemed.
* FantasticRacism: Briefly with the Mobiles. They felt that slowlife (biological life) was inferior to quicklife (computer life).

* GoodIsNotNice: Used over and over again as regards the [=Powers That Be=], especially the One's Champion.

* LanguageOfTruth: The Speech. Even the Lone Power can't lie while using the Speech.

* MagicPrerequisite: Only those specifically given Enacture (wizards) are capable of performing wizardry.

* TheWikiRule: [[http://www.youngwizards.com/ErrantryWiki/index.php/Main_Page The Errantry Concordance]], an unusual case in that only the creator can edit the articles. Updates tend to be sporadic as a result.

* ArtisticLicensePhysics: Entropy is really just based on probability and statistics.

* SomeoneHasToDie: It is an established rule in the books that, to defeat the Lone Power, someone or something must die.
** Usually.

* ArtisticLicenceBiology: [[spoiler: "Cancer virus",]] from ''A Wizard's Dilemma''.
** RealityIsUnrealistic: [[spoiler: Several cancers are caused by viruses, including a small percentage of brain tumors.]]

* HellishCopter: Nita and Kit have to fight a living helicopter that is out to kill them. It basically ends after Kit shoots off the tail rotor. We later find out it was just protecting it's [[{{BizarreAlienBiology}} babies]].

* ForeignExchangeStudent: The plot of the seventh book except replacing student with wizards. Nita , Kit, and Ponch go to one planet while three wizards from different planets come to stay with Dairine.

* FunctionalMagic: Wizards seem more like the IT staff and programmers of the universe than anything else. In W@W, Carl points out that "the Powers know what the universe acted like when it left the factory, but we're the ones who know the little noises it makes every day when it's running. And where to kick it to make them stop."
** They can do even cooler stuff if they get access to the kernel, and everything is right there in the man pages. The Young Wizards universe basically runs Linux. So I guess the Speech is bash? [[http://www.xkcd.com/224/ Or as XKCD says, perl?]]

** Exists on both sides of the wizards vs Lone Power battles. The Lone Power who exists outside of time, has already been redeemed, but its shadows still crop up. The wizards know that beating him in linear time won't make a knowable difference while the Lone Power knows it will ultimately lose and be redeemed.

* BewareTheQuietOnes: Nice and quite Nita, has a spell memorized that [[spoiler: can make all the cell membranes in your body disappear, the results are somewhat messy.]]. Later, faced with a bunch of aliens wielding fusion-powered weaponry, she puts a spell together to interfere with the containment fields; that goes into the Manual as "Callahan’s Unfavorable Instigation".

'' Those who will,
The Powers lead;
and Those who won't

* KilledOffForReal: Happens in more books than it doesn't.

** ''It's kind of like emmfozing, but with chocolate.''

** The side story 'Lifeboats' was, according to its Afterword, written as a deliberate subversion of this trope; the main characters are part of a planetary evacuation effort with thousands of other wizards involved, and they all have more or less the same crucial but menial job of keeping the evacuation portals working correctly.
* OurNudityIsDifferent: Filif's culture has a taboo about showing their roots. He has a haze around his so that none of the characters can see them.

* SapientCetaceans: The series features Cetacean wizards (the Trek novel ''Dark Mirror'' contains a ShoutOut to them). Of course, pretty much everyone and everything with more brains than a sponge has Wizarding potential in this setting.

* SheIsNotMyGirlfriend: From book 2 onward other characters think that Kit and Nita must be having sex. both Kit and Nita are at times annoyed at how often they have to deny this.

* AlternateUniverse: Nita and Kit spend a lot of the first book in a terrifying alternate New York. They go on a tour of other, less creepy ones in "Uptown Local".

* BewareTheQuietOnes: Nice and quite Nita, has a spell memorized that [[spoiler: can make all the cell membranes in your body disappear, the results are somewhat messy.]].

* AChildShallLeadThem: In ''Deep Wizardry'', S'ree becomes a Senior at a very young age because the Lone One made a whaling boat kill her mentor. This puts her in charge of the Song of the Twelve, which is basically the most important ritual in the sea--the last time it failed, an entire continent was destroyed. In ''Wizards at War'', [[spoiler: the older wizards lose their wizardry, which means that all the high-ranking positions like Senior are temporarily held by people who are fourteen at most.]]
* ComicBookTime: No more than four years worth of story pass from first book (published in 1983) to the ninth (published in 2010), yet each novel is ([[TechnologyMarchesOn technologically]]) set in the year it was published. And only a few ''months'' pass between books seven, eight, and nine.

* ContrivedCoincidence: Used and lampshaded repeatedly in the story; the PowersThatBe are so fond of using apparent happenstance and coincidences to get wizards to be in just the right place to do their jobs that they can often be heard repeating the phrase "There's no such thing as coincidence" to themselves and each other.
* ConvectionSchmonvection: Averted and possibly played straight in the same scene in book 8. While running through different worlds, Ponch brings them through a lava field. While only there for less than a second, the bottom of Nita's shoes were affected. While nothing specifically is stated of the other people wearing shoes, apparently, Ponch (a dog), Sker'ret (a large centipede-like alien) and Filliff (a tree) are apparently unaffected.

* MagicalComputer: Literally; though Nita and Kit have book-form Manuals and the animals tend to listen to the ocean or wind or whatever, some of the newer human wizards have their manual in laptop or iPod form (a UsefulNotes/{{Mac}} laptop no less, coincidentally. In-universe, the wizards designing the electronic manuals to resemble Macs because of the symbolism of having their logos be [[RuleOfSymbolism an apple without a bite out of it.]] (Think Adam and Eve, and the theme of a species' Choice to accept the Lone Power's "gift" of entropy.) Out of universe, Duane just really likes apple products (though the YW wiki maintains Windows and Android versions of the manual are being developed.)

* AscendedToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: In ''High Wizardry'', [[spoiler:Peach, having been the current form of the One's champion in disguise.]] In ''Wizards at War'' [[spoiler: Memeki and Ponch]]. In ''The Book of Night With Moon'', [[spoiler:Saash]]. In ''Wizard's Holiday'', it's [[spoiler: the entire planet of Alaalu]].