By Cynthia Ayala

Dorothy is finally dead. Or so they thought. Amy Gumm managed to save Oz but the Yellow Brick road isn’t done with her yet. Picking her back up from Kansas once again to drag her to the dark world of Ev to battle the Nome King and his new bride: Dorothy Gale. This is Amy’s last chance to save Oz once and for all without turning into a monster like Dorothy.

Published March 14, 2017 by HarperCollins, The End of Oz
by Danielle Paige is the fourth and final novel in the Dorothy Must Die Series.

This has been a very good series, but as it dragged out, it has begun to feel flat. The whole series has been based on Amy Gumm fighting to defeat Dorothy and Glinda, to end their reign of terror in Oz. That’s all been done. Sure new challenges have come up, but now with this new novel, a new villain has appeared out of the mix, the nome king. There just wasn’t enough set-up here to who this new villain was. Sure there’s some origin to who he was, his place in the grand scheme of Oz, but his connection is loose at best. It did lay out some good ground work for the ending of Dorothy but it lacked substance.

To be perfectly blunt, this novel could have been combined with the previous one, Yellow Brick War. While the idea of exploring the lands beyond Oz is interesting, if that was the route, Paige could have ended the series and explored a whole new trilogy to explore all the dangers of Ev. It really is such an interesting aspect of the novel to go to this new land that is Oz’s polar opposite, a land of darkness and corruption. It’s an interesting area to explore. There’s just not enough substance to make this novel work on its own, even with an interesting villain like the Nome King. But again, he’s pretty much only introduced at the end of the previous novel and then given the role of main antagonists in this novel. It just doesn’t seem flushed out at all.

Despite that however, the ending was well done. The way that Amy looks to the past, to who she was, to who she became, to everything that happened in life, it’s a great look at character growth. And, ultimately, her character growth was what allowed her to finally defeat Dorothy and save Oz. It’s still not enough to make this novel feel like anything more than an afterthought. Amy’s a great character, and it’s great that she gets her happy ending, but the novel doesn’t feel strong enough to end the series. (★★★☆☆ | B)

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