Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies's Reviews > Dorothy Must Die

Welcome to Oz. Take a look at the Yellow Brick Road. Like it? Good. Now run away, run faaaaaaaaaaar away. Pray for a tornado to take you back to Kansas, because man, Oz is fucked up as shit.

“Oz has changed,” Gert said. “The trees don’t talk. The Pond of Truth tells lies, the Wandering Water stays put. The Land of Naught is on fire. People are starting to get old. People are forgetting how it used to be.”

But let's get back to the beginning, what the fuck happened?! How did Oz get to...this?



The Summary:

Tornado or no tornado, I wasn’t Dorothy, and a stupid little storm wasn’t going to change anything for me.

Amy Gumm is white trash. She lives in a trailer in Kansas, with a drug-addict mom, no dad, and no future. She's stuck with her mom's pet rat named Star that, with her luck, might turn out to be Peter Pettigrew in the long run (I'm just kidding). Life fucking sucks. So when a tornado warning is announced, Amy doesn't really care. What's the worst it could do? Kill her? Life sucks, remember, so who cares about dying? Until well, shit, the tornado actually happens. Hint: it really sucks to be airborne in a metal trailer.

My stomach dropped and kept dropping. I felt my body getting heavier, my back plastered to the cushions now, and suddenly—with a mix of horror and wonder—I knew that I was airborne.
The trailer was flying. I could feel it.

She lands, thankfully intact, but it soon became very clear that she's not in Kansas anymore.

“Welcome to Oz,” the boy said, nodding, like he expected I’d figured that out already. It came out sounding almost apologetic, like, Hate to break the bad news.

And yes, Oz is bad news. Cause this ain't your grandmother's Oz. That cute little film with the pretty pretty verdant land of Oz? Nope. This Oz is more post-apocalyptic than fairy-tale.

A vast field of decaying grass stretched into the distance. It was gray and patchy and sickly, with the faintest tinge of blue. On the far side of the pit was a dark, sinister-looking forest, black and deep. The air, the clouds, even the sun, which was shining bright, all had a faded, washed-out quality to them. There was something dead about all of it.

After some mysterious parting words, the boy disappears, leaving poor Amy wondering what the actual fuck just happened? So she's alone in a strange land, cute boys appear and disappear out of nowhere. There's a yellow brick road. Should Amy make like Dorothy and follow Der Yellow Brick Road? *angelic choir sings AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH~*

I knew the answer already: what I was going to do next was the same thing I’d been doing my whole life.
I turned back. Just put one foot in front of the other. Nothing had changed except the color of the road.

Fuck, no!! This girl's got some common sense. She doesn't want to go wandering into a nuclear wasteland-Oz. Amy runs away! Bah, unfortunately, there's really nowhere else to go. I mean, think about it, you can either follow the ONE BRIGHT THING in this dilapidated world, or you can go wandering off to fuck-knows-where in the dark scary totally creepy mysterious forest with man-eating corn stalks.

Before I could even touch it, a black vine sprung up from the ground and curled around my arm like a whip, squeezing tight. It burned.

*snorts* And I thought High Fructose Corn Syrup was bad.

Amy follows the road. Reluctantly. Shit's looking reeeeeeeal familiar. There's Glinda, the Good Witch, only she looks like a Stepford Wife with a plastic grin. And apparently plastic grins are a thing in Oz, as a very angry Munchkin sees fit to tell Amy.

Other than the twitching, [her lips] didn’t move. At all. Even when she talked.
“What’s with her mouth?” I asked Star under my breath.
I jumped when an actual voice answered in a hoarse whisper from behind me.
“(A) it’s PermaSmile, and (B) are you out of your dumbass mind?”

Ok, so there really ARE munchkiins! Hooray! Except they're really sad munchkins, and to be fair, you would be too if your fellow Munchkins were being imprisoned and made to work their ass off to generate magic all damn day. And the monkeys, the flying monkeys. Fuck, they're now imprisoned, and some of them have had to take drastic actions.

“Don’t mind those,” he explained, seeing the look of confusion on my face. “That’s just where my wings used to be. Before I cut them off.”

So yeah, clearly Oz sucks now. So what happened?!

“They talk about Oz where I’m from. I’ve heard about it my whole life. But this is messed up. What happened here?”
Indigo’s impassive face twisted into a snarl. “Dorothy happened,” she said.

Oh, Dorothy. The lovely Dorothy. The crazy as shit Dorothy. You know that saying about power going to people's head? Yeah. That's what happened. Dorothy got more cray-cray over the years, and now she's imprisoning people, making poor munchkins work, enslaving flying monkeys, forcing everyone to wear Perma-Smiles like :DDDDDDDDDDD!!1!!1 every fucking day. And it's up to Amy to save them all.

Wait, what?! What the actual FUCK?! No! Amy just got here! She doesn't want this shit! She hasn't even graduated from high schoool. What the fuck is this about saving Oz?!

"That’s why you’re here. We need you to stop her.”
I sat up straight. I didn’t know the first thing about magic. I didn’t know the first thing about Dorothy. “Me? I just got here. How am I supposed to stop anyone from doing anything?”

That's right! You tell them, Amy. I'd run away too. Screw this destiny shit. But there's a sect of people, the Order of the Wicked whose plans are to restore Oz to its former glory. Dorothy has stolen Oz's magic, and they want Amy's help to restore it. So what do they want Amy to do?

“Simple. You’re going to kill her.” She looked right at me and said, “Dorothy must die.”

MWAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA YES KILL THAT BITCH.

Sorry. I get a little excited over murder.

Needless to say, there's a lot of work to be done to take Amy from white-trailer-trash to "Teen assassin." There's going to be magical training, combat training, and tea parties. Yes, tea parties. Don't worry, it's all part of the Master Plan. *cackles*

Will Amy be able to help the people of Oz? Will she be tempted to make the same choices that Dorothy did?

“It’s your choice,” he said. “It’s not magic that makes you who you are. It’s the choices that you make. Look at Dorothy.”
“What about Dorothy?”
“That’s exactly what makes Dorothy evil.”

The Setting: Just fantastic. This is Tim Burton's Oz.



I'm not sure if someone has bought the rights to the movie yet, but this is a book that deserves to be visualized. The setting is just beautiful. It is such a dark, twisted version of Oz. There's the beauty and darkness of the land itself, the stunning Emerald City hiding all sorts of horrors. You think you know the Tin Man?

His oversize jaw jutted out from the rest of his face in a nasty underbite, revealing a mess of little blades where his teeth should have been.

The Scarecrow? The Lion? Not these versions. The Lion and his army of rabid animals (including a giant fucking murderous bunny) will eat you up. Get ready because people will die.



This book is so dark. The characters are so angry, with good reasons. So many have been enslaved, so many have been killed, sacrificed at the whim of Dorothy and her gang. Yes, there are munchkins, but munchkins have family, friends, loved ones who have died, too.

“You asked why they work for her,” she said. “You asked why the Munchkins don’t just tell Glinda to fuck off and take her machine somewhere else.”
“Yeah. I was wondering that. Maybe it was stupid of me.”
“It was,” Indigo said, shooting me an annoyed look. “Do you think they have a choice?"

They cannot stand up against the power of those with magic. Hell, even the trees aren't allowed to be happy.

“Did that tree just move?”
“They talk, too, but they’ve taken a vow of silence.”
“Voluntarily?”
“The princess felt that their conversation ruined the apple-eating experience and was therefore a violation of the Happiness Decree.”

Dorothy: My one complaint here is that Dorothy looks like a slut. Really, was it necessary to have Dorothy the Evil resemble a street walker? But man, her appearance is deceiving.

Instead of farm-girl cotton it was silk and chiffon. The cut was somewhere between haute couture and French hooker. The bodice nipped, tucked, and lifted. There was cleavage.
Lots of cleavage.

Don't be fooled by her appearance, Dorothy is twisted. It takes brains and manipulation and power to get as far as she did in the land of Oz. She commands her minions, the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, Glinda...etc, and they, in turn, command their own army. Dorothy may be vain, but power gets to people's head, and before you know it, they turn crazy. And yep, that's what happened. I'm not fond of the fact that Dorothy is pictured to be so vain, but underneath all that, there's sheer madness. And I can totally understand why she hates Amy so much.

Dorothy’s face was burning with aggrieved rage. “I am the only one. There can only be one.”
My gut twisted. I understood. We had the same story. It was like we were wearing the same dress to the prom. Dorothy thought her landing here was fate—that it made her special. Another girl from Kansas meant that it was just a regular occurrence and that she wasn’t special at all. Or—worse—that I was here to take her place.

She loves torturing animals, and there was a scene involving a mouse that was truly painful to read. Look up psychopath, that's Dorothy in a nutshell.

Amy: Amy is the kind of character that I love; she feels realistic. Yes, she does heroic things sometimes, like rescue people she really shouldn't be rescuing, but she acknowledges her stupidity. She is not TSTL, she sometimes has a few mean thoughts, and she gets a little mouthy and talks back when she's nervous. The difference between Amy and other bitchy YA characters is that Amy is never malicious. She's just kind of a jerk sometimes, like me.

Amy also has a tendency to get scared, to run away. And that's just fine with me. She's not perfect.

Why did I hesitate? Was I that weak?
I told myself that I didn’t want to ruin the Order’s plans—they’d told me to wait—but I knew that wasn’t entirely it. I’d chickened out.

I understand perfectly. I'm a wimp. I like the normal, the routine, if you hand me a Special Destiny, fuck no, you can take my destiny and you can have it. I just want to read books and be mean.

Amy actually trains for her skills, for her magic. It doesn't come to her naturally. She also doesn't hesitate to kill. Can I get a fuck yeah?

I sliced diagonally across his chest and then drew the knife out only to plunge it right back in, drawing an X along his left side with the blade.

Final comments: Reader beware that this is the first installment in the series, so expect a lot of world building, a lot of plot development, but not a lot of resolution. This book is a setup for the eventual showdown.

There is romance, but it's light. Amy has a crush, there is a hot guy in the book, but the romance is very light and it didn't bother me. The plot takes priority.

Overall: Highly recommended.