Dorothy Must Die!

I have always been fascinated with the idea that Dorothy Gale wasn't the great, special, caring girl she was from the movie. Her sweetness always felt too sickly sweet. Wicked came out when I was in college working in the university print shop. I would read it around cutting out negatives and burning prints. I loved that in the Wicked Witch's story, Dorothy was just some bumbling girl that happened to stumble into Oz and start screwing things up. Dorothy Must Die, which I lovingly refer to as "Kill Dorothy Vol. 1," takes the idea even further by making Dorothy evil and ambitious. Dorothy's story exists in this book. It's treated as the same fictional story about the same fictional girl that we know. In this book, people don't realize there's a part two to that story and that it's far from fiction.

Enter Amy Gumm. Amy is the product of a broken home. Her father left her and her mother for another woman when she was younger, and her mother became hooked on pills and alcohol to the point that Amy takes care of her more than the other way around. Amy lives in a trailer park and deals with ridicule from her peers. Salvation Amy, they call her because mean teenagers aren't typically very clever. She knows Dorothy's story well, and as a girl living miserably in Kansas herself, she doesn't understand why Dorothy would choose to come back to such mediocrity. On the cusp of a tornado, Amy's mom decides it's more important to attend a tornado party with her friend than stay and make sure her daughter is safe, and yep, she gets scooped up by a tornado and taken to the wonderful world of Oz. However, things are wrong.

Dorothy decided she liked recognition and praise. People in Oz treated her as if she were special unlike people back home. Dorothy returned and manipulated her way into becoming ruler in all but name since Ozma lives, even if she's only a shell of herself. Dorothy aligns herself with the heroes of her story, turning them into twisted versions of themselves as she begins to siphon the magic out of Oz for her own gain. The Scarecrow performs twisted experiments. The Lion eats people in both a literal and figurative way. The Tin Man is just sadistic. Glinda is basically an evil overseer, making the denizens mine magic because, in Oz, magic is something that comes from the land and it is not an infinite resource.

Dorothy continues on with the pretense of sweetness and friendliness while punishing the inhabitants for things such as Extreme Sass and Smuttiness. A fickle nature and a thirst for power make her cruel. Amy's arrival disturbs her. It shatters Dorothy's thin illusions of grandeur. Dorothy decrees Amy must stand trial for treason, which will certainly end in her death or worse. Before Amy is to be executed, she's rescued by the Wicked Witches who have banded together to oppose Dorothy. As they train Amy to become one of the Wicked, one thing becomes clear: Dorothy must die.

And Amy must be the one to kill her.

I hadn't intended to read this book since I avoid most YA. It sounded interesting, but not so intetresting that I felt I needed to read it. Even when writing my summary, it felt as if the plot was coming off as hackneyed. Bits are, but mostly, this was a fun book. This was chosen as the first read of the new year for a Goodreads book club I'm in. I whined. I groaned, but I decided to start the year right. I shifted around some things in my challenges to include it. I wanted to feel as if I accomplished something even if I hated the book. Might as well make it "count" toward some challenge.

Let me get my biggest peeve out the way right now. We all know what it is. It's what I always complain about in 90% of YA speculative fiction. Yes, it's the romance. Let's dwell on this for a moment. To skip all this ranting just jump down to the paragraph after O-Ren pulls out her sword.

Now, young adult books have to have a romance these days. That seems to be required. There's almost no getting around it except in rare exceptions. The love triangle is quickly becoming another requirement. The love rhombus is starting to be flirted with as well. I paused early in the book after the romance went from a love triangle to a love rhombus complete with the female aggression that usually accompanies these things. I hate girls behaving badly over a boy while he twiddles his thumbs.

One boy, Pete, is sweet and described as being beautiful to the point of almost being ugly. He's mysterious and closed off. However, you know how that goes. The other boy, of course, is an asshole, and asshole boys don't work for me in YA because writers go overboard. I love the bad boy in adult fiction and even most contemporary YA, but the same dynamics don't work for me in the speculative setting.

Nox, the bad boy, reminded me too much of another character and asshole love interest in the fantasy book, Storm Siren--a character I really disliked for most of the book--who acted as the main character's magic teacher much like Nox does in this novel complete with similar asshole tactics to make Amy's magic trigger in anger. For visual reference, I have decided that Nox looks like Kill Bill's Gogo. (Side Note: This actress also played one of my favorite characters from the kids who kill movie, Battle Royale) I am sure Gogo is what Paige basically described except with more muscles and more boy parts and gray eyes, of course.

Finally, Paige introduced another girl who, of course, seems to have it out for Amy because of Nox. Melindra is a survivor of the Scarecrow's twisted experiments. I like that's she proud of her survival and didn't respond negatively when Amy brought it up in a non-confrontational manner. To Paige's credit, it was less about Melindra wanting Nox for herself and more about feeling used and validation. So, in its own twisted way, it really was for Amy's good, and she acknowledges that Melindra was probably the only person who was truthful with her in an alliance, in a land, filled with misdirection.

After I let off steam about the romance forced into a book that otherwise had great things going for it, I pushed on. Then, I noticed the romance plot kind of faltered, fell apart, and became virtually nonexistent which was kind of weird for a YA book that set up a heavy angle, but it makes sense at the end. I admire how Paige totally twisted the angle by the book's end, but still the romance is a weird mess of a subplot. Because of how it played out, though, I'm curious as to how this will be resolved in later books or if that was Paige's strange way of twisting the convention and is now allowing the readers to follow the rest of the story set up by a dramatic finish. There's still room for the romance to either be typical or buck the trend in these books if she's committed to this romance thing. However, I can ignore the romance if she can keep up the pace.

So, there you have it. That is the worst thing I have to say about this book. Let's get on with the good.

As I said, I did not expect to like this story, and I just decided that it was probably going to take me forever to finish the book. Since I promised myself I wouldn't force myself to read things, I just knew I was going to DNF this early. Something happened, though. Very early in the book, I found myself fully engaged until the part I just ranted about. There was one bump before the romance where it did drive me crazy to hear Amy describe every young or possibly young person as "looking around my age." Are there no other ways to say a person looks roughly sixteen or no? Thankfully, she fell out of this habit. There were also some weird pauses in the narration. I don't know if that was a technical issue or not. Mainly the romance just annoyed me to the point of almost livid. Once I got the romance rage out of my system, I picked it back up and let go.

What I was treated to was a kid who escaped to this magical land that should've been a dream for her. Instead she finds an Oz oppressed under the thumb of Dorothy, an Oz where labels such as Wicked and Good are defined, redefined, and redefined again. The Wicked aren't the only ones trying save Oz. Though they seem the most powerful, another group starts to emerge that proves the Wicked just might have an equal rival. They share a common goal, but their intentions seem to differ, leaving Amy in a quandary of what's real and what's not. Nothing in Oz can be trusted, not even what you see before your own eyes. And Amy is just a girl from Kansas who has to decide not so much what to trust, but how to do what's right because Wicked and Good can be amorphous terms to people, especially in Oz. Everyone thinks they're the Good guy in a war, even when you're Wicked.

However, doing what's right, what's really right (and still such a subjective term) in this case, may not always make a person feel either way, but it will feel just, fair, morally acceptable, despite what other good or bad feeling is associated with it. The way this book handles it reminds me of another speculative book I read recently where one character believes a character to be "evil," but another character says this "evil" character will do what's fair, what's right, which apparently can earn a girl a reputation. So, Amy struggles with the idea of what is the right thing to do in Oz, but her goals start to take shape as the Wicked Witches train her in magic and martial combat. Is she still a good person despite her allegiances? Is Wicked the new Good?

I enjoyed Paige's magic system. It's flashy, but at the same time, not too flashy. Oz's magic is something anyone can harness even girls from Kansas. It comes from the land, and while anyone can learn magic, each person has a personal style that comes easier to them. Oz's magic is described as being unstable. It wants to change into something it's not. It doesn't want to be static. It's like a living thing in that way, and it shapes Oz. There's much talk about Oz not being the "same" with Dorothy, but one character in the book muses that Oz is never the "same." It's always changing, shaping itself into something new. Amy relates to Oz's magic. She understands wanting to be something else. Amy's identity, who she feel she is as a person, is something that comes up frequently. One of the first questions put to her is, "Who are you?" When she says she's just Amy, she's told "Amy is what you are called, not who you are." Oz's need to change weaves around Amy's own personal journey in finding herself.

The most important thing about this story is that it threw me for a huge loop. I mean, I didn't even suspect it was coming. As I mentioned elsewhere, I go into books pretty critically. My mind starts connecting things from the first word. I'm an over thinker. It's what I do. I do it all day--even at work. In fact, I've always liked processing, but I think my job made me do it even more that I would. It's just become a fact of my life now. There were some things that I found mildly surprising in this book, but mainly because I knew there could only be so many plausible outcomes. That surprise was really the joy of seeing what outcome was going to come to fruition, but there was one moment I was completely mind-blown. That doesn't happen often with books and me.

It was really a brilliant "glamour." When I thought about all the scenes that gave it away, I almost wanted to stand up and clap at how brilliant it was. I asked myself how did I not see that? Was I looking too hard? The ending made me bump my rating up. Even if it hadn't thrown me, though, this still would've been a fun journey through Dorothy's Oz. Coupled with Devon Sorvari's narration, who captures all the characters so well, I had a good time with the story despite some complaints. I'm looking forward to seeing where Amy's journey on the road to finding her truth and to helping Oz takes her.