Yellow Brick War

Yellow Brick War by Danielle Paige

This is the third volume of the four volume Dorothy Must Die series. It picks up where the second volume, The Wicked Will Rise, left off, with both Dorothy Gale and the Alliance of the Wicked, along with Amy Gumm, back in Amy's home town in Kansas. While Dorothy escapes back to Oz, the Wicked are marooned. Their only hope to get back to Oz is for Amy to find the silver slippers that Dorothy originally used to return to Kansas. Amy has no magic in Kansas, and has been presumed dead since the tornado blew her to Oz. While the witches hide, Amy returns to her mother's home and her high school. She searches for the shoes that will allow them to return to Oz and defeat Dorothy.

As with the previous two novels in the series Danielle Paige shows 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. Each book introduces more of Baum's characters, and brutally murders others. Like the first two, Yellow Brick War is best read as part of the series, as the story picks up and ends abruptly. I gave 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. Also the violent treatment of the battle scenes is not to my taste.