From time to time I’ll read stuff that isn’t part of the established “Oz canon”, but is directly inspired by Baum’s Oz works or it takes Oz and re-interprets it in an alternate way. The 1985 movie Return to Oz would be an example of this. Or Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series. Whenever I read this stuff I’ll try to throw a review up to add to my ever growing Oz review archives.
Recently, after watching Return to Oz for the Cult Film Club podcast and reading its novelization, I decided I was ready to try another “alternate Oz” story so I pulled the trigger on a book I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about; Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige.
I wasn’t for sure what to expect from this book when I started to read. Was it a reboot of Wizard of Oz? A sequel? A sidequel? I had no clue. So I loaded it on my iPad and hoped for the best.
It starts off a little slow. Amy lives in Kansas. Her father left her and her mom. The mom has become an addict. Life is not good. And we sort of get beat over the head with this for the first 75-80 pages. Amy’s life sucks. I get it. This early building of character angst for Amy is sort of tiring and why I no longer read as many YA books as I used to. That being said, the fun begins when the freak tornado hits and Amy wakes up in Oz.
What this book turns out to be is a sequel to The Wizard of Oz. I’d like to definitively say it’s a sequel to the book or the movie, but, like Return to Oz, they sort of hedge their bets and use iconography from both. Mainly, of course, it’s the damn slippers. But Paige is a little bit more ambiguous about the slippers. She mentions that Dorothy wore silver slippers, however there are statues in Munchkinland featuring Dorothy in ruby slippers and when we finally meet her, Dorothy is wearing ruby slippers. She never takes them off actually. But it’s honestly a minor thing, there’s a lot more going on than the slippers.
The biggest strength of this book’s story is the world building. The events in this book seem to take place many years after the original Oz book/movie. From context clues in the story it seems like events in the first two Baum Oz books (Wizard of Oz, Marvelous Land of Oz) happen as normal. It’s Dorothy’s return in the third book (Ozma of Oz) that events seem to “take a turn”. Many years before the events in this book, Dorothy returned to Oz from Kansas and Ozma made her a princess. Those events basically happened in the Baum books, but over the years Dorothy sort of becomes obsessed with magic. This obsession changes Dorothy’s behavior. It makes her more erratic. And with this change, her closes friends, Scarecrow, Tin Woodsman and the Lion sort of change with her. Dorothy supplants Ozma as the ruler of Oz and conscripts Glinda to enslave the Munchkins to start mining Oz for magic. Oz’s magic lies deep within its land so everyone is busy strip mining Oz and hoarding magic for Dorothy. And like I said, Dorothy’s friends sort of follow her lead. Scarecrow becomes obsessed with getting smarter. He starts experimenting on Oz citizens like a mad scientist. Studying their brains and creating weird monster hybrids. The Tin Man is in love with Dorothy and becomes the captain of her guard. The Lion goes savage and starts just indiscriminately eating people and drinking in their fear. It’s a very interesting idea that the gifts bestowed upon Dorothy’s friends (brains, heart, courage) are the very thing that are driving them mad. It can be dark and frightening, but I’m enjoying the world that Paige is building up.
So Amy shows up in the middle of all of this. We slowly learn all the backstory stuff I just talked about. Amy is put in a dungeon by Dorothy but is saved by The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked. The Order is a group of the witches of Oz that have banned together to stop Dorothy’s tyrannical rule. They include Gert, the former Good Witch of the North. Glamora, the twin sister of Glinda. And Mombi, the witch that originally secretly held Ozma in captivity from that second Oz book. The Order trains Amy to go undercover in Dorothy’s court in the Emerald City in order to get close to her and hopefully assassinate her and allow Oz to once again be free.
), also written by James Luceno, would work perfectly as a side-quel to this book. This is the written prequel to the movie Rogue One and it’s pretty great. It digs deep into the relationship between Galen Erso and Director Krennic. It also explores a bit more the rivalry between Krennic and Tarkin all while adding in backstory to how the Death Star was built and how it works and what they use to power the planet killing laser. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
in the series, but I’ve not delved into the second book yet. However, it’s on the plan for this year.
Cavalcade of Awesome 