I started reading this one boring Saturday afternoon and put it down after nightfall and just couldn't bring myself to care enough about the characters to pick it up again. It wasn't bad or anything. I just...couldn't be bothered.

Son of a Witch was better than Wicked, although a lot of that had to do with the fact that Maguire no longer seemed to feel the need to completely twist everything that L. Frank Baum ever said in the original "Wizard of Oz" book or that MGM ever did in the movie and, as such, he could focus a bit more on making the plot make sense (and feel less like an exercise in the macabre - which I will grant is Maguire's forte but that doesn't mean I have to like it).
Still, it had many of the flaws of the original, but the one I hate most is Maguire's inability to make his characters feel like people. They always seem like puppets, held in the hand of a fairly talented puppeteer with an extremely macabre attitude towards just about everything. I never actually connect with the characters, because I could never see them as anything other than the written manifestation of someone else's imagination - they have no life of their own.