The Wicked Years Complete Collection

Feeling Empty

While I found reading the book Wicked to be a delight and enjoyed the authors ability to create a social,political and religious system for the mythical land of Oz, creating believable characters who had their own shortcomings and personal failures. I was delighted to discover that he had written three more books creating a series. I couldn't wait to get into the pages and discover more of his storytelling. His second book continued with his ability to create characters that seemed real and yet lived unfulfilled lives bounced back and forth in time and took the reader to a string of journeys back and forth to no end. The third book which was centered on the cowardly lion had a theme all to its own as though it was written by the lion itself filled with flourishes and false bravado leaving any number of possibilities for the last book to achieve. And as I read the last book which pulled all the plot lines together of the previous three the author in one fell swoop revealed all the plot twists at once. But failed to remain consistent with the facts he outlined in the previous books. He then tried mercilessly for two chapters to tie up all of the loose ends of his story in a feeble attempt make any sense out of all he had previously written. I was very disappointed and left with an empty feeling of a story that in the end made had no purpose. He tried to make a statement of sorts with a few passages from other authors but they were irrelevant to his story and where he could have left the reader with a sense of fulfillment in the end he just created a bitter series of characters that never achieved any sense of purpose and therefore made his series seem to have no reason to be written. He really was on the right path for so long but the ending had a rushed feeling as though he was tired of telling his story and he just left everything in a vague purposeless fog. I can't say I didn't enjoy his story right up to the end and maybe I really looked to hard to find a positive resolution in the storyline he taunted the reader with a happy ending then went completely into left field giving no purpose to his tale. He should really read the story himself and reconsider all the witty puns he made pertaining to Dorothy and Judy Garland and found a way to end his story so you could feel like you accomplished something after three thousand pages instead of wishing you could rewrite the ending . I've tried to read other books from this author but none have been able to get my attention and I had so much hope for this series only to be left feeling as though I wasted my time at his expense.