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gabriella_florence 's review for:
Wicked Origins
by Paula Black
As a big fan of the Wizard of Oz as well as the story of Wicked, this sounded like an interesting read after seeing the description. The idea of changing the original story to fit a more modern audience is really great, especially whilst keeping some of the main traits of the original present within it.
The story as a whole was interesting and I feel that the later books will be really good at expanding on what has been set up here and move the story along nicely. Considering there are several questions that have been left open at the end of this book, it’s created a good base for the next book to move on from and build off of to make this a really interesting and good story.
However, this had to be a 3 star read for me for a few reasons. One is that I really struggled to connect with the characters. This is probably a more personal thing but I found it hard to connect with any of the 4 main characters. The 3 brothers all felt very similar to me and I don’t feel like I know them much better by the end of this book than I did when they were all first introduced. And I just felt that Dorothy was quite bland and uninteresting to read from the perspective of, as other than jumping from having no emotions to supposedly an overwhelming amount of them (though without her saying that constantly I’d struggle to see it for the most part), I feel that she really doesn’t change that much throughout this story or develop in an incredibly meaningful way. Again this is completely my opinion on the characters and how I read them, other people may love them or feel that the developed really well, this is just how I felt whilst reading.
In addition to this, there were many sentences that were not intelligible due to words being missing, being written in the wrong order spelt incorrectly. Though this is something that can happen to the best of authors, to have this many mistakes in consistently throughout the story really took me out of the world of Oz as I had to stop and fix the sentence in my head each time so I understood what was happening. Normally I can forgive this but the fact that there were so many (even misspelling the place/people of “Quadline” as “Quadlin”) really affected how much I enjoyed reading it unfortunately. As stated above, again, this is merely my opinion and how I feel when reading.
Despite these issues, I did enjoy reading this and will certainly consider reading the upcoming sequels too as I am very interested to see where this goes and what happens to Dorothy and the brothers. It will also be interesting to see if the author keep strictly to the original story or decides to change it. Therefore, though there are some issues, I would still recommend this if you are a fan of the Oz and are after a way to return back to that world again.
This review was written based entirely on my honest and true opinions and feelings about it.
The story as a whole was interesting and I feel that the later books will be really good at expanding on what has been set up here and move the story along nicely. Considering there are several questions that have been left open at the end of this book, it’s created a good base for the next book to move on from and build off of to make this a really interesting and good story.
However, this had to be a 3 star read for me for a few reasons. One is that I really struggled to connect with the characters. This is probably a more personal thing but I found it hard to connect with any of the 4 main characters. The 3 brothers all felt very similar to me and I don’t feel like I know them much better by the end of this book than I did when they were all first introduced. And I just felt that Dorothy was quite bland and uninteresting to read from the perspective of, as other than jumping from having no emotions to supposedly an overwhelming amount of them (though without her saying that constantly I’d struggle to see it for the most part), I feel that she really doesn’t change that much throughout this story or develop in an incredibly meaningful way. Again this is completely my opinion on the characters and how I read them, other people may love them or feel that the developed really well, this is just how I felt whilst reading.
In addition to this, there were many sentences that were not intelligible due to words being missing, being written in the wrong order spelt incorrectly. Though this is something that can happen to the best of authors, to have this many mistakes in consistently throughout the story really took me out of the world of Oz as I had to stop and fix the sentence in my head each time so I understood what was happening. Normally I can forgive this but the fact that there were so many (even misspelling the place/people of “Quadline” as “Quadlin”) really affected how much I enjoyed reading it unfortunately. As stated above, again, this is merely my opinion and how I feel when reading.
Despite these issues, I did enjoy reading this and will certainly consider reading the upcoming sequels too as I am very interested to see where this goes and what happens to Dorothy and the brothers. It will also be interesting to see if the author keep strictly to the original story or decides to change it. Therefore, though there are some issues, I would still recommend this if you are a fan of the Oz and are after a way to return back to that world again.
This review was written based entirely on my honest and true opinions and feelings about it.