Out of Oz

The Wicked Years, Volume 4

By: Gregory Maguire

Narrated by: John McDonough

Length: 28 hrs and 44 mins

Publisher's summary

The stunning conclusion to the smash New York Times best-selling series the Wicked Years

Gregory Maguire's Wicked Years series became national best sellers and the basis for a hit Tony-winning Broadway musical. Now, Maguire returns with the final installment in his transformative work, a thrilling and compulsively readable saga in which the fate of Oz is decided at last.

Once peaceful and prosperous, the spectacular Land of Oz is knotted with social unrest: The Emerald City is mounting an invasion of Munchkinland, Glinda is under house arrest, and the Cowardly Lion is on the run from the law. And look who's knocking at the door. It’s none other than Dorothy. Yes. That Dorothy.

Yet amid all this chaos, Elphaba’s granddaughter, the tiny green baby born at the close of Son of a Witch, has come of age. Now it is up to Rain to take up her broom - and her legacy - in an Oz wracked by war.

The stirring, long-awaited conclusion to the best-selling series that began with Wicked, Out of Oz is a magical journey rife with revelations and reversals, reprisals and surprises - the hallmarks of the unique imagination of Gregory Maguire.

Return to Oz: listen to another title in the Wicked Years series.; Download the accompanying reference guide.

©2011 Gregory Maguire (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers

OUT OF THIS WORLD

A skeptic at first, the hype and hooplah, I see now was well deserved. ELPHABA LIVES!

I didn't stop listening

I loved ever second of it, I loved that music it had as well. I got so into the book I just kept on cleaning, and other house projects.

Excellent!

Gregory Maguire just doesn't produce bad books. He is one of my favorite authors!

Loved it

This was the absolute best of the series, now I want more. I was expecting/hoping Rain would be expecting by the end.

Perfect Fairy Tale

After part three I began listening in shorter segments as I did not want the book to end and I knew it would not be finished in a tidy manner. It was not as life is not. One of the reviewers said that Elphaba's fate was known at the last page. I did not catch it at any rate and that adds to my sense of frustration. Gregory Maguire's writing is so tart and he catches the characters to my liking at any rate. By book Four many of them are my friends and I care for their well being. The narrator is perfection. I hope the untied strings means Gregory Maguire will come back add a few more books. Please do not let this be the last one in this series.

Best book in the series

This was the best book in the series and brought everything to a great closure.

Always love his books, great recording

I always tell people about his books and audio recordings. He's my favorite author, I've read all of his adult books and have them all on hard copy and audio.

entertaining

good end to the series would recommend enjoyed it. it's ruecker balls and where you least expect them

Love the Wicked Years

This along with the rest of the wicked series is fantastically entertaining! I loved them from start to finish.

Chances Are, You'll Be Safe in Judging the Cover

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Recommend a book in the Wicked series? HAHAHAHA.

No.

But why, you might be asking. Didn't I rate the book highly? Didn't I sit through every single one of the Wicked Years, gleefully bouncing up and down in my seat and clapping my hands like a three year old on a sugar rush? Why on earth would I forsake a recommendation on a series that has brought so much joy, so much food for thought, so much lasting pleasure into my life? Well, mostly for the same reason that I would never recommend full body tattoos or natto sushi. Namely, they're a commitment and a unique taste. And those types of books are ones that are rarely shareable. This is a huge monster of a book that requires more than just simple audience participation - it demands that you get on stage and join it in it's antics, and it screams for you to throw a few punches of your own into the mix as well.

Needless to say that if you got this far, if you read/listened to the other books in the series and actually LIKED them, as opposed to grudgingly reading them (which oddly enough, I think a fair number of this series do) , I think it's safe to say that you'll have a similar experience with this one. In a lot of ways I think that Out of Oz is a lot more similar to Wicked than most of its predecessors were.

I suppose I really can't add any more bits of wisdom other than that. The one good thing about Maguire's books is that if you read one you'll pretty much be able to gauge where you stand with all the others. Read Wicked and had mixed feelings? Well replace Wicked with Out of Oz and there's your magic answer. I don't think this is a book that someone should have to squander a credit on in the hopes that "this might be the one". If you haven't liked the series up until now, cut your losses and be done with it. If you do like these books then, yes, I wholeheartedly recommend it to you.

What other book might you compare Out of Oz to and why?

There is no one character - everything he narrates for this series in magical. As always I'm just floored at how wonderful John McDonough is. For me he is THE voice of the Wicked Years. I can't count the number of times I tried to read Wicked on my own way back in the day and failed for any number of reasons. But hearing these books read in his voice brought life into the characters and brought out subtleties in the plot that I never would have been able to construct on my own. Needless to say that while this book would have been fine in its own right, McDonough makes it a pure tour de force. So, that you John for making the commitment to this series.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No.

For one thing the book in print or in audio is HUGE.

Second, Maguire's prose is so steeped in lyricism, in witticisms and allusions that I think it would be a disservice to plow through it without taking some breaks in between to let it all sink in and ponder what it is he's trying to convey to the reader. Plus there is so. damn. much. emotional hardship in this book. Maguire is an author that really likes to put his characters through the wringer, and here, more than any other book in the series, it shows. In fact, I would probably go so far as to say that the central focus in Out of Oz is the concept of the Happily Ever After - that the only After's that really last are the ones that we continually watch over and mend on our own.

Any additional comments?

Two of my favorite lines/passages :

“She wasn't afraid of doing good or of resisting evil. She was merely afraid she might not be able to tell the difference.”

“Maybe that's what growing up means, in the end - you go far enough in the direction of - somewhere - and you realize that you've neutered the capacity of the term home to mean anything. [...] We don't get an endless number of orbits away from the place where meaning first arises, that treasure-house of first experiences. What we learn, instead, is that our adventures secure us in our isolation. Experience revokes our licence to return to simpler times. Sooner or later, there's no place remotely like home.”