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A review by michael__
Out of Oz by Gregory Maguire
5.0
Wicked is one of my favorite books of all time. Not only is Gregory Maguire's writing one of the great joys of modern literature, but the expertise with which he created Oz within the boundaries put out by L. Frank Baum before him was enchanting. However, when he decided to write Son of a Witch a decade later and then A Lion Among Men, some of the magic was lost. Maguire's writing was still top-notch and kept me enthralled throughout reading those novels, but I couldn't help noticing it seemed as though he wasn't entirely sure where to take his story after killing off the Wicked Witch of the West. The groundwork of where he wanted to take his story was there, but they, in my opinion, didn't really come to fruition due to - possibly - the short length of those two novels.
Out of Oz is a monster. Clocking in at 563 pages, it's even longer than Wicked and tackles concepts much more grand. Oz is in complete disarray, with Munchkinland at war with the Emerald City, Glinda is under house arrest, Dorothy has returned and is being charged with the murders of both Wicked Witches, etc. To say the least, the land of Oz is not the one to which you were introduced in the 1939 film.
To be frank, the first two hundred (or even three hundred?) pages of this novel are long and tedious. Even painfully so. Without giving too much away, it involves a lot of walking through landscapes and visiting different places of Oz that have little importance except for the fact that certain characters are hiding out from the persecution of the army. If you've read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I think you have a sense of what I'm talking about. However, as tedious as they may be, these scenes seem to offer a final farewell to places throughout the Oz landscape that have been visited in previous novels in the series, so they were for the most part forgivable. It's just the getting through it that's hard.
Once you pass those sections, however, it becomes much easier to appreciate the work as a whole. Maguire finally shows his vast talent at winding different, convoluted plotlines around each other, with twists that are both completely unexpected but make perfect sense. The characters introduced throughout this series that never really had a chance to be developed properly (Brr, Glinda, Candle, Nor, Trism, and of course, Rain and Liir) are all illustrated in this novel with great skill and care, making each character interesting.
Needless to say, Out of Oz is the best Maguire novel since Wicked. In equal parts heartbreaking, funny, melancholic, and rewarding, it gave the series a conclusion that is fully deserved and left just enough unanswered questions to keep the reader guessing at to what truly happened within its pages. Elphaba would be proud.
Out of Oz is a monster. Clocking in at 563 pages, it's even longer than Wicked and tackles concepts much more grand. Oz is in complete disarray, with Munchkinland at war with the Emerald City, Glinda is under house arrest, Dorothy has returned and is being charged with the murders of both Wicked Witches, etc. To say the least, the land of Oz is not the one to which you were introduced in the 1939 film.
To be frank, the first two hundred (or even three hundred?) pages of this novel are long and tedious. Even painfully so. Without giving too much away, it involves a lot of walking through landscapes and visiting different places of Oz that have little importance except for the fact that certain characters are hiding out from the persecution of the army. If you've read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I think you have a sense of what I'm talking about. However, as tedious as they may be, these scenes seem to offer a final farewell to places throughout the Oz landscape that have been visited in previous novels in the series, so they were for the most part forgivable. It's just the getting through it that's hard.
Once you pass those sections, however, it becomes much easier to appreciate the work as a whole. Maguire finally shows his vast talent at winding different, convoluted plotlines around each other, with twists that are both completely unexpected but make perfect sense. The characters introduced throughout this series that never really had a chance to be developed properly (Brr, Glinda, Candle, Nor, Trism, and of course, Rain and Liir) are all illustrated in this novel with great skill and care, making each character interesting.
Needless to say, Out of Oz is the best Maguire novel since Wicked. In equal parts heartbreaking, funny, melancholic, and rewarding, it gave the series a conclusion that is fully deserved and left just enough unanswered questions to keep the reader guessing at to what truly happened within its pages. Elphaba would be proud.