The Wicked Will Rise

The Wicked Will Rise by Danielle Paige

This is the second volume of the four volume Dorothy Must Die series. It picks up where the first volume, Dorothy Must Die, left off, right after an epic battle in the war of the wicked witches against Dorothy Gale and her followers, the Scarecrow, Cowardly Lion, Tin Woodman and Glinda the Good. The Emerald City is in shambles, and the forces of the Wicked have been scattered. Our heroine, Amy Gumm, is being rescued, along with Ozma, by a pair of flying monkeys, who plan to take them to Lulu, the Queen of the Flying Monkeys.

In the first book Amy Gumm was taken by a tornado to Oz. Only the fairyland of L. Frank Baum's imagination is turned upside down, with a tyrannical Dorothy draining all the magic in Oz to increase her despotic rule. Amy was recruited by The Revolutionary Order of the Wicked and trained to be the person to assassinate Dorothy. Their coup ends up being the first battle in a war, and The Wicked Will Rise tells the tale of Amy's continuing adventures, trying to reunite with the rest of the Wicked and complete her mission. First a visit to the Flying Monkeys and then a search for Polychrome, the Rainbow's daughter, leads up to her next confrontation with Dorothy. Amy is with Ozma through this whole book and learns much more about Ozma's past and watches as Ozma starts to regain her fairy powers.

Danielle Paige has a good grasp of the Baumian characters of Oz, and has a clever way of modernizing them to make them of interest to a modern Young Adult audience. This book is best read as part of the series as it picks up and ends abruptly. I give the book four stars instead of five because I feel the author is at times too free in her adaptation of Baum's characters, revisioning them for a modern audience in a way that is jarring and discordant to people who know them well from reading Baum's books.