Son of a Witch (continued)

So, no, it's not (as I said) an inherently bad thing that Son of a Witch is no longer particularly based on Baum's Oz; but it does mean that the book has to be judged on its own merits. Unfortunately, on those, it doesn't seem to stand up, and the way in which it fails to do so leads us back where we started.

Son of a Witch is very striking where it can hold itself up to Baum's Oz (and Fleming's), where the contrast between those shows the novelty and brilliance of Maguire's reimagining of Oz: the conversation with Dorothy, or the interaction of Animals with human(oid) society — scattered twinkling points from a twisted lattice.

And then Maguire fills in the spaces between those points of light with all the grace and curvature of a turtle doing connect-the-dots puzzles, inked in the tarry black of current-day headline news and the much-trodden-carpet brown of Generic Fantasy Land #3b; the result is something that reads, outside those few compelling passages, very much like a McDonald's hamburger tastes.

(Yes, the metaphor-mixer is stuck on frappé. Shut up.)

Since the next book in the series, A Lion Among Men, necessarily primarily concerns at least one of the Baumian characters, it has every chance of avoiding the above; but even though I'm not yet personally going to drop The Wicked Years entirely, I can't justify recommending anything past Wicked to the casual reader.

Unlike the last sequel I read, I can justify giving Son of a Witch a numerical rating; what I can't justify is making that rating any better than a (somewhat disappointing) 1 out of 1.