Book Review - A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in the Wicked Years

I just finished reading A Lion Among Men: Volume Three in the Wicked Years this week. I was very excited to see it was out last month. I read Wicked in the summer of 2006 and Son of a Witch in the summer/fall of 2006. For those of you who may not know about Wicked, it is the story of the "Wicked Witch of OZ" (or Elphaba, which is her name we find out) from the classic story The Wizard of OZ. This story basically takes the classic tale and looks at it from a different angle, telling you the story of how Elphaba became "wicked" and what the story of Dorothy looks like from her perspective. Two sides to every coin, remember. It is a very well told tale and very interesting.

I originally learned about Wicked via a weird source - Broadway! I was reading about Broadway star Idina Menzel who was in Rent and trying to find out what other shows she had been in, because she has a really amazing voice! Then I stumbled upon Wicked. They had taken the book and turned it into a Broadway musical! The men behind the music and lyrics of Disney's The Little Mermaid were behind reinventing the story from a book to musical, and they really did an amazing job! Check it out if you ever get a chance.

Anyway.....the first two books were very good. They totally sucked me in and were told so well that I just got lost in them. This third book did the same. It fleshed out a bit more of the story, but tells mostly more about the "Cowardly Lion," and Yackle (an oracle nun of sorts) from the Wicked and Son of a Witch books. It was fun to get some more background on OZ, on its history and about some of the different geographical regions. Overall A Lion Among Men was a great book, but it leaves us hanging (again) for a follow up. I hope it does not take as long for the next one to come out, but if the quality will stay, I will wait. I would rather wait for a good story than get a quick, crappy book! Below is the 'official' book description:

"Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Gregory Maguire's fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In the much-anticipated third volume of the Wicked Years, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion—the once tiny cub defended by Elphaba in Wicked.

While civil war looms in Oz, a tetchy oracle named Yackle prepares for death. Before her final hour, an enigmatic figure known as Brrr—the Cowardly Lion—arrives searching for information about Elphaba Thropp, the Wicked Witch of the West. As payment, Yackle, who hovered on the sidelines of Elphaba's life, demands some answers of her own.

Brrr surrenders his story to the ailing maunt: Abandoned as a cub, his earliest memories are gluey hazes, and his path from infancy in the Great Gillikin Forest is no Yellow Brick Road. Seeking to redress an early mistake, he trudges through a swamp of ghosts, becomes implicated in a massacre of trolls, and falls in love with a forbidding Cat princess. In the wake of laws that oppress talking Animals, he avoids a jail sentence by agreeing to serve as a lackey to the war-mongering Emperor of Oz.

A Lion Among Men chronicles a battle of wits hastened by the Emerald City's approaching armies. What does the Lion know of the whereabouts of the Witch's boy, Liir? What can Yackle reveal about the auguries of the Clock of the Time Dragon? And what of the Grimmerie, the magic book that vanished as quickly as Elphaba? Is destiny ever arbitrary? Can those tarnished by infamy escape their sobriquets—cowardly, wicked, brainless, criminally earnest—to claim their own histories, to live honorably within their own skins before they're skinned alive?

At once a portrait of a would-be survivor and a panoramic glimpse of a world gone shrill with war fever, Gregory Maguire's new novel is written with the sympathy and power that have made his books contemporary classics."