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The first section was perfectly lovely: subtle, strange, and believable. For me, things went off track a bit at Kiamo Ko; I couldn't quite make sense of why the pacing needed to be so slow, and Elphaba was weirdly passive. And when everyone in the castle was taken by the soldiers, it made no sense to me that she wouldn't follow and try to save them; what was she waiting for? And if she didn't care enough about Nor to go after her then, then I don't buy that Nor's safety could later affect the choices she made in any way. A lot of the plot depended on the neglect of children; it was so pervasive that it probably wasn't meant to reflect badly on any one character, but the result was to distance me a bit from *all* of them. I really expected the enchanted antlers to show up again; maybe this is something I'm missing because I haven't read most of the original Oz books. I'd read this again, or seek out more by the same author, just for the friendship between Elphaba and Galinda and the marvelous strangeness of the world-building.

2022-10-29 03:32