This was loads of fun.

 

One of my favorite things about retellings is watching precisely how they are going to twist things around. I have heard complaints that retellings are somehow less creative because they require some kind of outline of a basic story to be followed to be a proper retelling. I have always felt the opposite. Because the writer is restrained by the outline of the story, creativity is harder and therefore more interesting. I know some of what I am going to see--how am I going to get there? What is going to be the same and what is going to be different? What kind of spin is this going to have on things? I am wildly addicted to the entire concept and have been for years.

 

This was a fabulous twist on a story. Both major contributors to the Oz canon were recognized throughout: the 1939 film and the books. It was nice to see the nods to the extended literary canon, much of which tends to be ignored in any kind of Oz story.

 

I missed the twist at the end where it was revealed

I feel stupid missing it, because it is kind of part of the canon, though a part I often forget about entirely and probably hadn't thought about in decades. It was also totally awesome in its own right.

 

I liked the characters in general. Nobody that you recognize from the original stories is at all what you expect, and the differences are generally quite grotesque.  The author played up the horror of Oz, which always felt more obvious in the books, and then turned it up to eleven and turned everything around on its head. Dorothy herself is a monster, though how she got that way is a bit questionable (not because it is not explained, precisely, but because several options are presented), and her loyal companions have had the strongest parts of their personalities twisted in a way you can almost see coming.

 

I felt the new characters were interesting in their own right. I like Amy quite a bit, as she  had some serious guts and managed to be sometimes rude and sometimes pushy and sometimes kind of dumb, but never malicious, which seems to be an alarmingly difficult line to walk in YA sometimes. She doesn't come from a good life and somehow gets thrown into an even worse situation, but she deals with it as best she can and somehow manages to make an impact, even though she doesn't precisely come out on top.

 

The side characters were intriguing and I'm not sure of the motives of quite a few of them. We have several factions set up here by the end and I'm not positive who is allied with whom or why.  I was not expecting how several of the characters turned out

and watching everything play out was a lot of fun.

 

This was absolutely not a stand-alone book in a lot of ways and the sudden revelation at the end is clearly going to be key to the rest of the series. I've already got the next book reserved at the library and I can't wait to see what happens next in the Oz that went so wrong.