love this!! great sequel to wicked!!

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This was read by the author and he wasn't the best one for that job. He was pretty flat.

I'd read some of his earlier work and swore I woudln't read him again. Then, I got talked into reading Wicked which I LOVED! I thought that maybe he'd improved so I got this one. No, apparently Wicked was just a fluke! I finished this, but it isn't one I'd recommend.

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12 CDs, 14 hours, Unabridged, read by Gregory Maguire

Sadly, it was a mistake for Gregory Maguire to read his own work. He is somewhat hissy, requiring me to turn the treble way down. He is by turns stiff and overly dramatic. Character voices don't always stay the same and have strange accents that garble the words. I felt that it improved as the story went on, but I may have just gotten used to him. This was a difficult listen, although the story was strong enough, particularly in the second half, that I did manage to finish.

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This story picks up a short while after Wicked ends. Liir is struggling with life after the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. There are many questions that he has, most pressing â is he Elphaba's son? Liir sets out on a journey to try and find some answers to his life. This path leads him into interaction with Dorothy, Glinda, the army, and the maunts (like nuns). Liir has to find out who he is and this story really is about him coming of age in the shadow of a well known Witch.

I would definitely recommend reading Wicked before picking up this one otherwise you will be completely lost as to who the characters are and what is going on in the Land of Oz. Like Wicked, a lot of what happens in the story is based on the political upheaval in Oz. I had read Wicked a couple of years ago, and I still had some trouble following the politics of the land. In this book, Dorothy and her 3 friends (4 if you count Toto) have more of a role. Other than them, Liir and Glinda, you really won't recognize any of the characters from the traditional story of Oz. This was a little bit of a problem for me as a reader. Unlike Wicked, I couldn't connect with the characters â even though they we mentioned in passing or were related to the traditional characters, I just didn't feel for them as much.

The narrator of this audio book was the author, Gregory Maguire, and I'm not sure that I liked him as the narrator. He gave individual voices to all of the characters (and even did a little signing too!) but somehow it just didn't keep me interested. I think that my opinion of the book might have been changed if I had read the book or if it had a different narrator. Sometimes the author is just not the best choice.

I found the book hard to get into at the beginning, but by the end I was rooting for Liir on his quest and hoping he would find what he was looking for. I want to read the third book in the Wicked series, A Lion Among Men, focusing on the life of the Cowardly Lion, but I think I will take some time before I jump into that one.

3.5/4 out of 5

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