I Can't Believe I Forget These Books on my Last List

I know I just did a post on books (sorry, non-book readers!), but I totally forgot some books on that list and it's bothering me, so I'm adding to the list here.

The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex - I don't usually read middle readers because I think I skipped that step in my reading life. I feel like I went from picture books straight to Harlequin romances, so these early chapter books are sometimes difficult for me to comprehend.  But this book was awesome. I enjoyed every page. The main character was charming, if a bit dense at times, and I liked the theme of girl power going on in in this book.  If you have kids who have read The Rats of NIMH and want something else, I think this would do okay.  (Okay, I feel like that's saying that Harry Potter folks should read Percy Jackson.  It won't be as good, but it will satisfy some small part of the hole in your heart once you're done with the best.)

The Wicked Years series by Gregory Maguire including Wicked, Son of a Witch, A Lion Among Men, and Out of Oz - God, I can't believe I forgot to include these books.  These books were MY LIFE for so long this autumn.  I was hanging out in Oz while the rest of the world went on around me.  These books are long, dense, and dreadfully inconsistent.  Let's discuss.

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West is the first (and probably most famous) of the novels in this series. It's the basis for the Broadway show that I haven't seen, so I can tell you absolutely nothing about the comparisons (maybe Denora could help you with that), but this book is a killer.  I am the dumbass who decided I would buy the unabridged audiobook for my trips back and forth between where we live now and the Twin Cities when I was making that trip two times a week for a while.  It was approximately eighty million hours long and I felt every hour as if it were an entire week. The first half is SO BORING I thought I would die, but I persevered and got interested in the last half.  So there's that.  Maguire is a master of setting and I feel like he was loyal to L. Frank Baum's original world while adding much needed complexity. If tales of political intrigue and international relations interest you, you'll forgive Maguire for the somewhat tedious backstory in the beginning of the novel for the payoff at the end.  So I was interested enough to get the second installment from our library.

Son of a Witch - This is the best book in the series, by far. I desperately wanted more about the main character from Wicked (Elphaba), but got a book about someone else entirely.  You'd think the title of the book would have clued me in, but sometimes I'm not so smart.  Despite my expectations, I loved where Maguire went with this book because there was only so much he could do with the slightly prickly character of Elphaba and I thought it was a brilliant move on his part to go in this new direction.  When I was done with this, I went right to the library to get the next installment in the series.

A Lion Among Men - zzzzzzzzzzzz...I hated this book. It took me two weeks to get through it (which is insanely long for me).  I didn't care for all the backstory on the Cowardly Lion and the flashbacks were hella boring.  I felt like this book was a strange placeholder in the series that did absolutely nothing to move the plot forward.  I just wanted this book to be over.  And when it was over, I decided I had to complete the series because the last book had just come out AND there was a chance the last book would be as good as Son of a Witch.

Out of Oz - This book was released on November 1 of this year and I was at the library that week and I was the FIRST PERSON to check it out of our library.  Woo hoo!  I wanted to love this book and I loved parts of it, but not the whole thing.  There were some slow moving plots and reintroducing long forgotten characters who acted out of character.  The ending did nothing but make me feel ambivalent about ALL THE TIME I spent reading these books.  But, and this is a bit but, I am glad Dorothy Gale came back and I feel like that made the series come full circle.

All in all, I would recommend reading the second half of Wicked and all of Son of a Witch.  Sadly, if you did that, you would probably be completely confused.  But once you're done with Son of a Witch, the rest of the series is completely optional as far as I'm concerned.  If you're going to read this series, be warned that it will take forever.