Status Updates From Wizard's Holiday

This is one of my favorite books in this series, and the scene where Harry meets Filif, Roshaun, and Sker’ret for the first time is a large part of the reason why.

He takes everything in stride and de-escalates the scene in a way that struck me as kinda neat, even as a kid. And now that I’m closer to his age than Nita’s, it strikes me still.

258-259: Tom’s “cardinal events”/hinge soliloquy. Another 9-11 reference.

”Well, how many wizards have you known?” This is Dairine, so technically, she created an entire race of them.

Reading this book (pub. 2003), the whiffs of post-911 are detectable. Of course, since that's not specified in the text, they feel congruent to our brutal present. "Interesting times?" "Interesting times. The world isn't quite what it used to be, lately..." "Most of us have noticed."