Book: Dorothy Must Die

Dorothy Must Die
by Danielle Paige

Length: 480

Format: Paperback
Price: I can't remember...I ordered it off Amazon several months ago

How I heard about it: it's on the book list I made from my YAL conference

Basic Premise: The story of Dorothy Gale from Kansas as we know it is a complete sham. Dorothy is the witch, and she must be stopped, or Oz will be ruined forever.

My Take:

I normally don't review books I abandon. It doesn't seem fair, as if I didn't give a book a fair shake. And perhaps I didn't. But I stuck with my 10% rule (I actually think I read more like 20%), and I just couldn't stick with it. Here are a few reasons why.

#1 - I wasn't a fan of the protagonist. The things that happened to her in the story are pretty outrageous, and rather than reacting with shock and consternation, like a normal person would, she seemed to accept strange turns of events with little concern. That made the story pretty unbelievable and made her an unreliable narrator. Now granted, I'm dealing with fantasy, so maybe I'm being too harsh here, but the things that should be unbelievable in a fantasy should be things like mythical creatures and magic, not personality traits.

#2 - I probably could've recovered from the protagonist thing, but what I couldn't do was deal with the writing style. It was sloppy and uneven, and it makes for confusing reading. And I find this particularly frustrating because I think this is a brilliant concept! Dorothy as the bad guy? The witch was in the right all along? Who wouldn't want to be about that? Stories like this in the hands of writers like this make me scratch my head. (I feel compelled to note here that I also felt this way about the Twilight books. They are some of the best selling books of ever. This book, also, is a relatively well selling book. So it appears that few folks agree with me. But there you have it.)

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