• Author: Danielle Paige
• Series: Dorothy Must Die #1
• Genre: Fantasy/Re-telling
• No. of pages: 452
• Dates read: 30.06.19 – 04.07.19
• Rating: 3 stars
• Challenge: ONTD Challenge July Theme, “Read a re-telling.”

I mean WOW what an ending!

I love a re-telling but most importantly I love a DARK re-telling and this book delivered.

Plot (taken from Goodreads): 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 bluebirds. 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 a yellow brick road – 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.

First of all, I want to say that despite its faults, and there are a few, this honestly was such a ride and incredibly fun and exhilarating to read. I will start off with the positives of my experience reading.

I really enjoyed the world-building and being able to explore this twisted and evil version of Oz. It was exciting to enter a world that you had once visited as a child and see it change so drastically. It also helped as a reader to put yourself in Amy’s shoes as you are both experiencing the same thing!

Dorothy is AMAZING! I loved her evil and tyrannical side, I enjoyed every scene she was in. She just exuded power and charisma. I found her to be such a fascinating character and I just yearned to find out more about her and her drastic change of personality.

Every character Amy meets on this journey is important to the story. Whether it is in teaching Amy a lesson or advancing the plot. I didn’t feel like any character was haphazardly written or forgotten about along the way, each character was integral to the story. Even Amy’s pet rat was important! This just made me really appreciate Paige’s writing, she clearly took a long time to map out each character and it’s relationship in Amy’s story.

I really enjoyed the plot for this story but my favourite part of the novel would have to be the last third, all the moments when Amy is in the Emerald Palace. The stakes felt incredibly high especially every time she was in Dorothy’s proximity. So many revelations were discovered or important plot points were laid out, it just was so exciting to read, I couldn’t keep up! I basically read that last third within one day. I was loving it so much.

I liked Amy at first but then I wasn’t so sure about her character about halfway through the novel, as she started making dumb decisions which also contradicted with the writing. She would feel a certain way about a character but it wouldn’t be portrayed well in the writing. Amy would say she disliked a character but I found, as I was experiencing the same scene as her, that I actually really liked the character and couldn’t understand why Amy would feel that way. I was thinking are we experiencing the same thing here? So that was confusing to get my head around but by the end of it she pulls through big time and I couldn’t help but just love her.

I’m not going to lie at times it did feel like a cringey YA story. I felt that the plot was really strong but at certain times the writing was lacking. Some of the writing and the dialogue made me physically cringe it felt like an adult trying to sound like a teenager, it felt really out of touch.

I also really didn’t care for the romance in the story. The romance sort of just came out of no-where and then there seemed like there was going to be a love triangle, which made no sense as none of the romance was set up properly, but that just faded away weirdly. I just don’t think it was written very well at all.

The next book I will be reading is The Secret of Chimneys by Agatha Christie. I am currently on holiday when this is published and whenever I go away I love to read at least one murder mystery. I don’t know what it is but it is a must for me. I will still be having posts go out in the mean time, so keep your eyes out!