Review: 
 Protagonist: At the end of The Wicked Will Rise Amy Gumm finds herself and Dorothy transported back to Kansas and a group of witches welcoming her into the fold... or so it all seems. Amy is truly back in Kansas but it's not too long before things get hairy and Amy, Nox, and the witches are all stuck in Kansas and need a very special item to find their way back to Oz, but until then Amy needs to insert herself back into her old life and do her best to help with the search for the way back to Oz. This book gives readers a wonderful opportunity to see that while Dorothy and Amy are similar in where they come from and that they both wind up in Oz, they're very different deep down. Dorothy led a bit of an idyllic life while Amy was an outcast, upon arriving in Oz Dorothy wanted to go home, but Amy wants to stay, and best of all, upon returning home Dorothy saw her idyllic life as stale and wanted to return to the wonder of Oz while Amy sees what her time away from Kansas has changed in her life and she may not be too willing to head back to Oz and leave her new old life behind. 
 Romance: While this story seems to be the most romantic of the books in this series so far, I have to say the romance never really appealed to me in this book. Honestly, though, I don't think it's because the romance is handled badly, I think it's more because it's been so long since I've read a main installment in this series and I've forgotten most of the romance that's happened between Nox and Amy. It's not that I don't want them together, the romance doesn't seem problematic in any way, but the author introduces a forbidden love aspect to the romance that was extremely unnecessary and just gave me an overall meh feeling in relation to the romance. 
 World Building: One of the things that always bothered me about the first installment in this series is that we never really got to see a good chunk of Amy's life before Oz, we saw enough to know what she was going through, but I still felt like the book jumped to Oz too quickly. In this book, we get to see more of Amy's world and her day to day life, though it's nowhere near the same as before she left, it's the touch of normalcy and the effect of her disappearance that lead to a very interesting adventure in Kansas before she has to go back to Oz and finish the job assigned to her. I do have to say one thing though, this story has too many villains. I mean, Glinda and Dorothy are one thing, we go into this story knowing that they are villains, but between the Wizard in the previous book and a new "mega" villain introduced in this book things have gone from complex to complicated in the villain department. This world is getting more and more complex in ways that I do enjoy, but there are spin-off feeling aspects that seem to be leaking into the flagship series. 
 Predictability: So after this book got off to a rip roaring start, I thought I knew exactly where things were going to go. I knew the formula for this type of a book and saw where the end point should have been. Boy, was I wrong though. Not too far into this book, there's a shift and things only get crazier from there. There were a few twists that I was quickly able to pick up on, things that felt way too predictable to be true, but were anyway. There's a lot that goes down in this short book, but much like the fact that there were things I could easily predict there were things that I could have never even dreamed about predicting. This book is a wild ride and crazy twists are to be expected. 
 Ending: With a few tweaks this could have easily been the final book in this series. I mean, this series doesn't NEED to be more than three books, but things were introduced in this book that extended it by one more book. That being said though the final climax of this book was pretty awesome, and while I do feel that the series is being stretched a bit thin, I am really excited to see where things will go from here and how everything will be tied up by the end of the series. The story does end on a bit of a cliffhanger, but not as crazy a cliffhanger as the previous book did. 
 Rating: 
 This book was pretty amazing. Like I said, I do feel like things were stretched a bit thin and things are getting more complicated than complex, but this is still a very addicting and enjoyable series and I can't wait to see how it all wraps up.