Author; Danielle Paige
Published: April 1, 2014
Hardcover, 464 pages
5 Gold Stars
(summary from Goodreads)
I didn't ask for any of this. I didn't ask to be some kind of hero.
But when your whole life gets swept up by a tornado - taking you with it - you have no choice but to go along, you know?
Sure, I've read the books, I've seen the movies. I know the song about the rainbow and the happy little blue birds. But I never expected Oz to look like this. To be a place where Good Witches can't be trusted, Wicked Witches may just be the good guys, and winged monkeys can be executed for acts of rebellion. There's still the yellow brick road, though - but even that's crumbling.
What happened? Dorothy.
They say she found a way to come back to Oz. They say she seized power and the power went to her head. And now no one is safe.
My name is Amy Gumm - and I'm the other girl from Kansas.
I've been recruited by the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked.
I've been trained to fight.
And I have a mission.
This is not the Oz we know. Dorothy's back with a vengeance and have hoarded the magic from Oz. It's gone to her head and no one can stop her. Oz is no longer a friendly place. The Lion is the leader of an army, the Scarecrow is a mad scientist who experiments on traders in his workshop and the Tin Man patrols the area and punishes those who go against Dorothy's rules. Few people left in Oz believe there is hope for saviour, but when Amy drops from the sky through a tornado, the same way the last girl from Kansas arrives, they think she may be able to save them.
I loved this book from the start. Amy doesn't have the best life. She lives in a trailer with her mom and she can't wait to get out of her little Kansas town. But ending up in Oz was not in her plan. Oz is very different from what you'd remember from the original book or movie and Paige has drawn this new world out of a well known one. When we land in Oz with Amy, we're shocked mostly because it's so different. Amy quickly becomes involved with the Wicked Witches, who in this version of Oz, are the good guys. She joins the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked and begins training to do one thing - kill Dorothy. It was a lot of fun to read about Amy going through the motions of learning magic and falling for her trainer. There are hints at so much more to come and I'm sure the next instalments will be just as good. Dorothy was awful, but I loved what they did with her. She was kind of slutty, really bossy and the perfect person for you to hate. I loved how different, yet similar this was to the original. All the characters made appearances, but in very different ways. The plot was fast-paced and kept adding to the whole story and the ending, leading up to Amy killing Dorothy was well done even though that didn't happen.
My only problem with it is that in the inner flap describes what Amy needs to do: Take the Tin Man's heart, steal the Lion's courage and take the Scarecrow's brain and then kill Dorothy. There's no mention of any of this in the book until the last chapter and then it all happens very quickly to finish the book. I would have liked that to be a bigger plot from the beginning instead of something talked about vaguely and then accomplished in less than a page. All in all, it was a great re-telling and I'm excited to read more of this series. I'll never look at Oz the same way again.
"And then I thought: Bring it on. There's no place like anywhere but here."
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