Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

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Publication date: 2014
Publisher: Full Fathom Five
Pages: 452
My rating: 3 stars
Ages: 16+

Amy Gumm has been picked on for years--ever since her dad left, and her mom got addicted. So when she's taken from Kansas to Oz, she's ready for a change to good. Unfortunately, Oz is not the Oz in the stories. Dorothy has returned and the power has gone to her head. In order to save Oz and its people, Amy must kill Dorothy.

I was really intrigued by this book when I saw it at the bookstore; an intrigue which slowly lessened into interest as I started reading it. It was hard for me to overcome Judy Garland's Dorothy and believe that Dorothy had become a power hungry despot who showed way too much skin. This book is full of gray areas and very little black and white, good and evil. Just as Amy doesn't know who to trust, neither do the readers.

My biggest disappointment came as I was nearing the end. I had about 50 pages to go and started wondering how the story could be completed in that amount of time. Simple answer: it couldn't. This was the beginning of a series. There was absolutely no way this could even try to act as a stand alone novel, but there was no clue anywhere that I could see (and I started looking at the back of the book, and on the flaps) that there would be more books. Instead of feeling that I completed a story in 450 pages, I ended the book feeling like it had all been set up to the real story that was to come.

There was some hard swears, but no sexual situations.

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