When Nita finds the book in the library entitled So You Want to Be a Wizard, she thinks at first that it must be a joke. But after she takes the Wizard’s Oath at the front of the book, strange things begin to happen. She finds she can understand the trees - and the trees speak back. Soon Nita finds herself in an eerie, alternate Manhattan where the sun doesn’t shine because there is none and the helicopters and automobiles are alive and predatory. She is accompanied by another young wizard named Kit and a white hole with a temporospatial claudication (a fancy way of saying that its mass is elsewhere). Together they fight the creater of darkness himself, while they search for a book that will save Manhattan - their Manhattan - from extinction.