Out of Oz

I picked this book up about as soon as I finished A Lion Among Men because it felt that the series was in an upswing after the fairly middling Son of a Witch, but I was left feeling rather disappointed.

Overall, the plot and a lot of the ideas in the book are incredibly interesting. You have Loyal Oz and Munchkinland finally going to full blown war, with all that entails. Both sides are searching high and low for the Grimmerie to tip the scales. Dorothy comes back and is wrapped up in the political ploys of Munchkinlands new government. Liir and Candle have to learn how to take care of their child after abandoning her for her own safety, and Rain grows up in the 10 year civil war and has to become herself despite the constant danger she's in due to her family.

All of this is interesting, and Maguire get's a fair lot of interesting ideas in, showing how society deals with prolonged conflict that they only experience at a distance, mainly by how it effects commodity items. The way that families are torn apart due to state interests, and the tough choices they have to make in times of conflict that are understandable but can't always be forgiven. Historical events, even those only a generation old, can have its understanding changed for political convenience. These all flow naturally from the way the series has developed, and it makes sense to explore them in this book. However, I feel that Maguire's writing style is often at odds with the subject matter here, and the pacing of the book is almost glacial.

The book mainly follows the characters going to ground in various locations around Oz during the civil war, and hearing about everything after it's happened while they bicker and grow to resent each other. While this makes sense, almost every character is a wanted criminal at this point and none have ever been a mover or shaker in a way that would force them to be involved in the war directly, what we get are variations of the same tired arguments, constant reiterations of the same exposition we got not only in previous books but in this book itself, and Maguire attempting moments of Bathos which for me simply did not land.

For me, the most interesting part of the book to actually read was the section following Rain at St. Prowd's, a school for girls in Shiz. This section has Rain gain her first real friends and romantic attachment and develop into her own person, as well as showing us a ground level view of people dealing with the middle years of the stalemated civil war. This whole section was fun to read, and played to Maguire's strengths. I thought that I had finally gotten through the slow period that the first three books all had at their beginnings. But this was around 300 pages into the book, and unfortunately, it turned out that this part of the book was a short lived peak. Once Rain inevitably returns to her family to book returns to its middling quality all the way through the end.

While Out of Oz does provide a lot of closure to the series and it does have a few flashes of what I enjoy of Maguire's writing, by the time I got to the last fifth of the book I was just pushing myself to get through it so I could move on.

It has Maguire's characteristically slow pacing, but fans of the series will find this a satisfying conclusion.