Welcome to Oz. Take a look at the Yellow Brick Road. Like it? Good. Now run away, run faaaaaaaaaaar away. Pray for a tornado to take you back to Kansas, because man, Oz is fucked up as shit.Oz has changed, Gert said. The trees dont talk. The Pond of Truth tells lies, the Wandering Water stays put. The Land of Naught is on fire. People are starting to get old. People are forgetting how it used to be.But let's get back to the beginning, what the fuck happened?! How did Oz get to...this?The Summary:Tornado or no tornado, I wasnt Dorothy, and a stupid little storm wasnt going to change anything for me.Amy Gumm is white trash. She lives in a trailer in Kansas, with a drug-addict mom, no dad, and no future. She's stuck with her mom's pet rat named Star that, with her luck, might turn out to be Peter Pettigrew in the long run (I'm just kidding). Life fucking sucks. So when a tornado warning is announced, Amy doesn't really care. What's the worst it could do? Kill her? Life sucks, remember, so who cares about dying? Until well, shit, the tornado actually happens. Hint: it really sucks to be airborne in a metal trailer.My stomach dropped and kept dropping. I felt my body getting heavier, my back plastered to the cushions now, and suddenlywith a mix of horror and wonderI knew that I was airborne.The trailer was flying. I could feel it.She lands, thankfully intact, but it soon became very clear that she's not in Kansas anymore. Welcome to Oz, the boy said, nodding, like he expected Id figured that out already. It came out sounding almost apologetic, like, Hate to break the bad news.And yes, Oz is bad news. Cause this ain't your grandmother's Oz. That cute little film with the pretty pretty verdant land of Oz? Nope. This Oz is more post-apocalyptic than fairy-tale.A vast field of decaying grass stretched into the distance. It was gray and patchy and sickly, with the faintest tinge of blue. On the far side of the pit was a dark, sinister-looking forest, black and deep. The air, the clouds, even the sun, which was shining bright, all had a faded, washed-out quality to them. There was something dead about all of it.After some mysterious parting words, the boy disappears, leaving poor Amy wondering what the actual fuck just happened? So she's alone in a strange land, cute boys appear and disappear out of nowhere. There's a yellow brick road. Should Amy make like Dorothy and follow Der Yellow Brick Road? *angelic choir sings AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH~*I knew the answer already: what I was going to do next was the same thing Id been doing my whole life.I turned back. Just put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had changed except the color of the road.Fuck, no!! This girl's got some common sense. She doesn't want to go wandering into a nuclear wasteland-Oz. Amy runs away! Bah, unfortunately, there's really nowhere else to go. I mean, think about it, you can either follow the ONE BRIGHT THING in this dilapidated world, or you can go wandering off to fuck-knows-where in the dark scary totally creepy mysterious forest with man-eating corn stalks.Before I could even touch it, a black vine sprung up from the ground and curled around my arm like a whip, squeezing tight. It burned.*snorts* And I thought High Fructose Corn Syrup was bad.Amy follows the road. Reluctantly. Shit's looking reeeeeeeal familiar. There's Glinda, the Good Witch, only she looks like a Stepford Wife with a plastic grin. And apparently plastic grins are a thing in Oz, as a very angry Munchkin sees fit to tell Amy.Other than the twitching, [her lips] didnt move. At all. Even when she talked.Whats with her mouth? I asked Star under my breath.I jumped when an actual voice answered in a hoarse whisper from behind me.(A) its PermaSmile, and (B) are you out of your dumbass mind?Ok, so there really ARE munchkiins! Hooray! Except they're really sad munchkins, and to be fair, you would be too if your fellow Munchkins were being imprisoned and made to work their ass off to generate magic all damn day. And the monkeys, the flying monkeys. Fuck, they're now imprisoned, and some of them have had to take drastic actions.Dont mind those, he explained, seeing the look of confusion on my face. Thats just where my wings used to be. Before I cut them off.So yeah, clearly Oz sucks now. So what happened?!They talk about Oz where Im from. Ive heard about it my whole life. But this is messed up. What happened here?Indigos impassive face twisted into a snarl. Dorothy happened, she said.Oh, Dorothy. The lovely Dorothy. The crazy as shit Dorothy. You know that saying about power going to people's head? Yeah. That's what happened. Dorothy got more cray-cray over the years, and now she's imprisoning people, making poor munchkins work, enslaving flying monkeys, forcing everyone to wear Perma-Smiles like :DDDDDDDDDDD!!1!!1 every fucking day. And it's up to Amy to save them all.Wait, what?! What the actual FUCK?! No! Amy just got here! She doesn't want this shit! She hasn't even graduated from high schoool. What the fuck is this about saving Oz?!"Thats why youre here. We need you to stop her.I sat up straight. I didnt know the first thing about magic. I didnt know the first thing about Dorothy. Me? I just got here. How am I supposed to stop anyone from doing anything?That's right! You tell them, Amy. I'd run away too. Screw this destiny shit. But there's a sect of people, the Order of the Wicked whose plans are to restore Oz to its former glory. Dorothy has stolen Oz's magic, and they want Amy's help to restore it. So what do they want Amy to do?Simple. Youre going to kill her. She looked right at me and said, Dorothy must die.MWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA YES KILL THAT BITCH.Sorry. I get a little excited over murder.Needless to say, there's a lot of work to be done to take Amy from white-trailer-trash to "Teen assassin." There's going to be magical training, combat training, and tea parties. Yes, tea parties. Don't worry, it's all part of the Master Plan. *cackles*Will Amy be able to help the people of Oz? Will she be tempted to make the same choices that Dorothy did?Its your choice, he said. Its not magic that makes you who you are. Its the choices that you make. Look at Dorothy.What about Dorothy?Thats exactly what makes Dorothy evil.The Setting: Just fantastic. This is Tim Burton's Oz.I'm not sure if someone has bought the rights to the movie yet, but this is a book that deserves to be visualized. The setting is just beautiful. It is such a dark, twisted version of Oz. There's the beauty and darkness of the land itself, the stunning Emerald City hiding all sorts of horrors. You think you know the Tin Man?His oversize jaw jutted out from the rest of his face in a nasty underbite, revealing a mess of little blades where his teeth should have been.The Scarecrow? The Lion? Not these versions. The Lion and his army of rabid animals (including a giant fucking murderous bunny) will eat you up. Get ready because people will die.This book is so dark. The characters are so angry, with good reasons. So many have been enslaved, so many have been killed, sacrificed at the whim of Dorothy and her gang. Yes, there are munchkins, but munchkins have family, friends, loved ones who have died, too.You asked why they work for her, she said. You asked why the Munchkins dont just tell Glinda to fuck off and take her machine somewhere else.Yeah. I was wondering that. Maybe it was stupid of me.It was, Indigo said, shooting me an annoyed look. Do you think they have a choice?"They cannot stand up against the power of those with magic. Hell, even the trees aren't allowed to be happy.Did that tree just move?They talk, too, but theyve taken a vow of silence.Voluntarily?The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree.Dorothy: My one complaint here is that Dorothy looks like a slut. Really, was it necessary to have Dorothy the Evil resemble a street walker? But man, her appearance is deceiving.Instead of farm-girl cotton it was silk and chiffon. The cut was somewhere between haute couture and French hooker. The bodice nipped, tucked, and lifted. There was cleavage.Lots of cleavage.Don't be fooled by her appearance, Dorothy is twisted. It takes brains and manipulation and power to get as far as she did in the land of Oz. She commands her minions, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, Glinda...etc, and they, in turn, command their own army. Dorothy may be vain, but power gets to people's head, and before you know it, they turn crazy. And yep, that's what happened. I'm not fond of the fact that Dorothy is pictured to be so vain, but underneath all that, there's sheer madness. And I can totally understand why she hates Amy so much.Dorothys face was burning with aggrieved rage. I am the only one. There can only be one.My gut twisted. I understood. We had the same story. It was like we were wearing the same dress to the prom. Dorothy thought her landing here was fatethat it made her special. Another girl from Kansas meant that it was just a regular occurrence and that she wasnt special at all. Orworsethat I was here to take her place.She loves torturing animals, and there was a scene involving a mouse that was truly painful to read. Look up psychopath, that's Dorothy in a nutshell.Amy: Amy is the kind of character that I love; she feels realistic. Yes, she does heroic things sometimes, like rescue people she really shouldn't be rescuing, but she acknowledges her stupidity. She is not TSTL, she sometimes has a few mean thoughts, and she gets a little mouthy and talks back when she's nervous. The difference between Amy and other bitchy YA characters is that Amy is never malicious. She's just kind of a jerk sometimes, like me.Amy also has a tendency to get scared, to run away. And that's just fine with me. She's not perfect.Why did I hesitate? Was I that weak?I told myself that I didnt want to ruin the Orders planstheyd told me to waitbut I knew that wasnt entirely it. Id chickened out.I understand perfectly. I'm a wimp. I like the normal, the routine, if you hand me a Special Destiny, fuck no, you can take my destiny and you can have it. I just want to read books and be mean.Amy actually trains for her skills, for her magic. It doesn't come to her naturally. She also doesn't hesitate to kill. Can I get a fuck yeah?I sliced diagonally across his chest and then drew the knife out only to plunge it right back in, drawing an X along his left side with the blade.Final comments: Reader beware that this is the first installment in the series, so expect a lot of world building, a lot of plot development, but not a lot of resolution. This book is a setup for the eventual showdown.There is romance, but it's light. Amy has a crush, there is a hot guy in the book, but the romance is very light and it didn't bother me. The plot takes priority.Overall: Highly recommended.

Im rating this book 4.5 stars.

I think "Dorothy Must Die" was one of the titles I initially thought had the most potential among some of the newer releases in YA for this year. I find the quirk in the title rather humorous and have seen variations of it before (a.k.a. "Hello Kitty Must Die," etc.) But sadly, Danielle Paige's debut really didn't impress me all that much.It's the very definition of what I call "great premise, lacking execution." But that's not to say that I disliked it collectively. No, it left me quite disappointed because of its respective potential not reaching up to what was actually delivered. The ideas were sound, the delivery was not.Amy is a sharp girl with pink hair, considered an outcast with a trailer park lifestyle, alongside considerations over a father who abandoned her and a mother she barely recognizes. When her home is swept away by a tornado, Amy lands in Oz. Yet, Oz is not the majestic wonder depicted either in L. Frank Baum's classic story or in the movie with Judy Garland. Dorothy, Glinda the "Good" Witch, Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion have all turned evil. Amy not only has to figure out exactly what happened to Oz, but determine her respective loyalties and ultimately accomplish one task: Kill Dorothy.But for all the promise in the latter notation, maybe this narrative should've been titled "Dorothy Should Die." Or "Dorothy Almost Dies." Because there wasn't any Dorothy slaying going on in this book. More like the precursory details getting to that point. For as often as it kept reiterating that Dorothy *must* die and the build up associated with that, it didn't deliver. But that's not what bothered me the most about this book (though I'll admit the ending felt lackluster and not really an ending at all, just a cruel, incomplete lead-in to a series starter).The story started off with steam - I followed Amy well enough as she was determined as an outcast thrown into Oz's otherworld, which seemed like an alternate version of Wonderland or Tim Burton's imaging of Halloween Town. Initially, this was cool. I also liked her rapport with Indigo, a cursing munchkin and Ollie, the wingless flying monkey. I even liked that this book didn't skimp on the violent details with some cruel fates delivered at the hands of the familiar character that were once pride and joys of the Oz narrative. So where did it all go wrong?First issue that bothered me about this book was narrative pacing - it dragged to no end after a respective time. In some cases I was forgiving of the narrative because it seemed like it was trying to set up details about what happened with Oz, but when I realized Amy wasn't accomplishing a whole heck of a lot and that the characters would appear only to disappear for long stretches at a time (i.e. her pet rat Star and the boy entrusted to keep her safe, Pete), I became concerned. I wasn't really sure why so much time was spent on Amy being undercover, training, being in the dark about her Wicked associations and the like. I wanted the action to start picking up its pace and her goals to be more meaningful. It felt like Amy really wasn't doing a whole heck of a lot, despite some spells where we see examples of Dorothy, et. al's cruelty in this reimaging of Oz. The second issue is related to the first: the more I thought about it, the more I realized this reimage of Oz really didn't have a lot of flesh to it. The environment was threadbare in its drawing, never immersed me completely. The strength to L. Frank Baum's original tales was that it had a strong sense of place in every book, alongside its respective cast of quirky and interesting characters. In this, I could only get a fraction of where this was taking place despite some cool descriptions here and there. That's probably the main thing - it *sounded* cool, but its heart was missing, much like Dorothy's purported turn to darkness. It felt lacking to a fine point. Even the characters themselves felt only threadbare in their construction - serving a purpose before being tossed aside, sometimes for chapters at at time, with lacking development or threadbare motivations. I couldn't feel for them all that much. I initially felt for Amy because of her respective problems and even something of a snarky voice, but by the time I got to Oz, I just felt like the character motivation was dropped several notches on the building ladder. Amy's voice no longer carried her, she was being carried by the story events itself. It carried a guise where it seemed like Amy was being proactive for what the situation allowed, but only in spurts. I could get her motivations for wanting to help Ollie's sister, and consulting the magic mirror. But I just didn't get all the time spent where she was undercover for so long without so much as an idea of what she would have to do next. Not to mention waiting for other characters to act (though I understood that she was kept in the dark on purpose and some of her tasks were "tests" if you will.) The problem was that I just couldn't care despite being kept in the dark like Amy was.Her attention to (and jealousy over) Nox annoyed me, but not to the point where the relation completely threw me from the novel. I think that may have been the start to where I started noticing things going downhill for the work, and where the pacing of the tale became problematic. I'll admit that even with Amy's recruitment into Wicked, I was bored from the lack of motivation and depiction. So much of that time could've been tightened up for events. I couldn't even feel for one of the major character deaths around that time because the pacing in that part of the novel crawled so much. The writing really wasn't that strong to me. Throwing in bits of Oz lore alongside major pop culture references didn't really endear me to the novel either. As much as I appreciated references to Wicked, the movie Highlander, Star Wars, and Harry Potter ("Not my daughter, you bitch!" "Not my dog, you bitch!"), it was trying too hard. It was trying *way* too hard to be modern and edgy. It felt false and *that* was what threw me out of the story more than a few times. It all came across as "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" and I wasn't buying what it sold for its commercial measures.And maybe that was the problem - this feels like a commercial title, not so much taking advantage of the imaginative and interesting pieces that it puts forth. It's an introduction, but it never really carries the ideas home. Probably the only story thread I even felt remotely satisfied by in this tale was the journey to rescue Ollie's sister (and Indigo's respective role, but that was over before it really began). It's cake icing that's pretty and sweet, but you take a bite of it and that's all you're getting. Bring all the action, visual gore, snark, cursing munchkins, brain eating, ax grinding and such you want, but if you get to the heart of this, what does it really contribute? The answer really isn't all that much.I may end up trying the sequel, but definitely with a lot less expectation and excitement than I had for this one. I can't say I would recommend it personally, though I think some will end up enjoying it for what it offers. You just have to wade through a lot of scenes where it seems like it introduces a lot of build up and cool stuff, but in the end, just puts a finger on the pulse of potential. And that leaves the experience hollow and something that I just couldn't get behind.Overall: 2/5 stars.