Dorothy Must Die Review

Dorothy Must Die by Danielle Paige

5 of 5 stars

This was one of those books I was anxiously awaiting and when the store I work in got it in, I was so excited to check it out, but was also nervous that it would fall short. It did not disappoint.. I finished it in 3 days. I couldn’t put it down. And I didn’t know it was part of a series. I don’t read books that have a sequel until all of the books are published. Because it makes me crazy to get to the end of a book and know that there’s more and have to wait for it. This was definitely a great example of this. I’m going to try to be as descriptive as possible without giving anything away.

What I liked:

*I love the new take on the Wizard of Oz. I love that Dorothy and her friends are the villains. I love that the lines of Good and Wicked have been blurred.

*The world building was beautiful. The descriptions of Oz itself were fantastic, but the descriptions of everything else going on were also lovely.

*I liked the development of most of the characters.

*This was a <very> dark twist on the original story and it works well.

*There is a lot of action going on.

*Even though she was a stereotype a lot of the time, Amy was clever and witty.

*There was very little romance. While I’m usually all about romance, it’s often a frustrating subject in teen books. There was some very minor romantic interest, but no one is making decisions based on the love of their life that they just met.

What I didn’t like:
*I hate pop culture references and they tend to be all over the place in teen fiction. Fortunately, like many other books, the references stop after a short while.

*There was a lot of angst going on. I wanted to slap Amy during about ¼ of the book.

*Some of the foreshadowing was way too overt, but it never led to anything.

*You can tell that the writing is from a new author, but it wasn’t awful.

*This is a series. How did I not know this was a series??? It felt like the book just stopped. I understand cliffhangers, but ugh.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone who likes retellings, but I would probably suggest to wait until the next book is out, if not all 3.