Dorothy Must Die

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When I finished this book I gave it four stars. After a day or two thinking about my review I decided to dock that down to three.

I mostly enjoyed this story. Growing up, I read all of the Oz books (some several times), so when Paige talks about the Patchwork Girl or Ozma or whomever I actually remember who she’s means. Paige clearly did her homework or grew up loving Baum as much as I did.

Paige’s rewriting of the canonical characters was pretty intense. They really gave me the creeps but I guess that’s what she was going for. The Lion was the worst for me and his main scenes would be horrifying on a movie screen…but I wouldn’t really want to watch the Scarecrow’s scenes either.

With that said, I feel like a lot of the book could have been left out or sped up. Between the big moments of action were pages and pages of (what felt like) filler. And not a whole lot actually got accomplished over the 452 pages. Amy still has a lot more work to do, enough (at this rate) to fill two more books, and I have a lot of questions that weren’t answered.

But even with the filler I never thought about putting the book down, so that’s why it’s still getting three stars instead of two. And I’ll probably read the sequels too.

Importantly, this book didn’t really inspire me to pick up my own manuscript and make it better. It didn’t inspire me. So while interesting (and wonderfully promoted), I give it just three stars.




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